May 2019 | view full story as a .pdf

Out of the fray but close to all the Ogunquit action, Rose Meadows is the perfect idyll for whiling away your endless summers.

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” –L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

By Colin W. Sargent

Society portraitist Channing Hare lit up Rose Meadows for decades. In 1951, George Kane, the financier who would vault the Au Bon Pain bakery chain to world renown in the late 1970s, snapped up this bonne bouche.

“My father spent summers here until 2009, when he was nearly 105 years old,” his daughter says. “He carried on his life to the end!” Always at full tilt, Kane was also on the board of directors at Panera.

To reach this mansion at 84 Pine Hill Road, it’s a five-minute stroll from the lush gardens at the top of Perkins Cove to this lofty position. The spirit of the Ogunquit art and theater colony is center stage here. Listed for sale for $2.89M, Rose Meadows is itself a performance piece, lifted into memory by fragrant shore breezes.

Mists of Memory

“I was 17 or 18 when we moved in,” Kane’s daughter, who asked not to be identified by her first name, says. “I entered Smith College and graduated in 1955. Sylvia Plath was a classmate of mine. She studied English. I majored in Government.”

Rose Meadows still majors in loveliness. “My favorite place is in the second-floor library, but I love the porches–especially the one off the library. It’s a friendly place. I remember reading Kenneth Roberts’s Arundel there.” From this Olympian perspective, viewers are treated to luscious, private views of the grounds across 2.3 acres. “The roses at Rose Meadows are mostly tea roses. It’s just so beautiful.”

Kane’s daughter is silent a second. Is she remembering something?

“I used to have an Irish setter who just floated over the meadows. Her name was Patty.” During the winters, Patty stayed with the family at their winter residences on Beacon Street and Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. During the summers, the entire family felt the rush of release when they made it back to the Maine coast.

Channing Hare “built the four-car garage. Oh, yes, he stopped by the house! I met him a number of times. He was very charming, interesting, funny.” Hare, who kept a pet Belgian hare on the grounds at Rose Meadows just to spoof his name, excelled at capturing the sharp-angled grace, the prickly interiority of his subjects.

No wonder he fell for the inexpressible, trenchant quiet of Rose Meadows. Because this house is a celebrity convergence zone, Hare may have painted his portraits of Kennebunkport novelists Booth Tarkington and Kenneth Roberts here.

During his return visits to Rose Meadows after selling the property to the Kanes, Hare probably enjoyed seeing some of the world-class art the Kane family has amassed and displays to this day. “My uncle, Charlie Smith, was the collector in the family,” Kane’s daughter says.

The gates and fences surrounding her estate have additional wire protection against deer, who dream of sailing over the barrier and into the heavenly pasture. “I haven’t seen them climb over the fences. They’re just here when I get here.”

Inside, the gorgeous stairways excite with four matched art glass finials on the Newel posts. “My mother found them at the Edith Cooke antique store in Wells,” way back when. Just a guess: Pierpoint?

What a place to entertain. They could have shot the movie The Man Who Came to Dinner in this house. “We serve lots of lobster in the dining room or on the porch off the dining room.”

Fresh-Baked Inspiration

A few years before 1980, Kane’s daughter’s brother, Louis Isaac Kane, who was an executive at Kane Financial with his dad, bought the “Au Bon Pain bread and croissant shop in Faneuil Hall Marketplace and expanded it into a chain, with [the elder] Mr. Kane serving on the board…In 2002, Fortune magazine reported that [Kane fils] appeared to be the oldest corporate director in the country, having been re-elected to a three-year term on Panera’s board at 96,” according to the Boston Globe. Backed by his father’s money and guidance, Louis would lift Au Bon Pain to a household name (no matter its comically different pronunciations) as a delicious bakery/bistro at airports and malls across the universe.

Written on the Wind

With its pillars and gambrels, 10 bedrooms, 6.5 baths, Rose Meadows could also be a set for shooting Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte. Can’t you just see Bette Davis leaning down from the second floor gallery?

Built in 1895, the house’s voice prints likely include ghostly visitors including Claudette Colbert, a pal of Hare’s. “Channing Hare was the second owner,” Kane’s daughter says. “As far as I know, the house was originally built for two sisters from the West. I thought it Chicago, but I may be wrong. There’s a letter from the architect to the sisters written in pencil that says he’ll do the finest job and use mantelpieces from Portsmouth, and it will cost $9,000. I couldn’t find it last summer.”

Game of Scones

It’s not just the deer who’ll want to sail over the fence into Rose Meadows. It’s hard not to envy the buyer who’ll come here. Will it be a private residence or a B & B where all the stars at Ogunquit Playhouse will want to stay? It’s zoned for both.

Will Kane’s daughter feel funny if new buyers rip out all of her perfect decorating, paint over the pickled paneling, paint the exterior licorice black, dump the books in the library to create an awesome media room, and line the windows with huge bleached starfish from away?

“No, they can decorate any way they like. It’s their right.”

2017 taxes were $9,940.