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View from the Galley by laurie lamountain

There are two things in particular that have informed Julie Whelchel’s interior design process. Perhaps foremost is her love of boats.

“I grew up sailing with my dad, who was a NASA engineer, and he was really clear and precise about how things should be done, not how he wanted them done, but how things should be done and why they should be done that way. In his mind there was only one right way to do things. He really taught me how to observe things and make the best choices about my actions and part of that came out of sailing.”

The second influence is really an offshoot of the first. After her father retired from NASA, he imported Swedish yachts and from them Julie came to appreciate how functional the inside of a sailboat is; there is nothing superfluous. She majored in Industrial Design in college, focusing on design of small, non-static spaces, with a goal of designing the interiors of boats. But while Industrial Design initially seemed like the logical avenue for her, after embarking on a career in the automotive industry in which she focused specifically on the child safety seat market, she graduated with a degree in Industrial Management.

Julie found herself, as a detail-oriented person with an artistic drive, in the very technical role of designing systems so they wouldn’t fail, or if they had non-conformities, tasked with solving the problem. Essentially, she found herself a professional problem solver with an inner artist wanting to share the stage.

In 2003, she and her husband, Rick, left their careers in Ohio and made the bold move of becoming New England innkeepers. They bought the Noble House Inn in Bridgton and immediately began renovating and restoring the inn to its original 1903 Queen Anne Victorian features, including the exterior stonework and piazza stairs, using the original blueprints for reference.

“Our time as innkeepers helped inform how I designed those spaces. It was really an unintentional study in human behavior, in terms of how people use spaces,” says Julie.

Ironically, Julie and Rick were part of that study. They converted a third floor suite to serve as owner’s quarters. Given that it was an attic space with eaves along the sides, Julie was tasked with carving living space, bedroom, bath and storage space out of a long, low-slung space. By designing everything with a low profile and so that a lot of the spaces could do double duty, she was able to make their private haven feel much more spacious and serve them functionally for the ten years they owned the inn.

In 2009, they bought the historic 1873 H.O. Moses Apothecary on Main Hill in Bridgton and worked on it as they could until selling the inn in 2012. The Whelchels then took a “gap year” to painstakingly restore the ground floor to house J.Decor, a retail source for handcrafted furniture and home furnishings carefully chosen by Julie to pay homage to the craftsmanship of that era. Given that the impressive architectural details of the space had not been compromised, the apothecary itself was a major preservation effort with minor restoration. The 2000-square-foot owner’s apartment on the second and third floors was a different matter.

Both floors were in need of major restoration and added renovations to meet their 21st century needs, such as heat, bathrooms, and laundry. Julie was faced with a host of challenges redesigning the apartment in keeping with its Victorian roots. The rooms are large and high ceilinged, which presents its own challenge.

“When they’re too big for the intended use, you’ve really got to start thinking, how do I break it down into small, useable spaces? That’s what we did in this kitchen. We have a built-in banquette with a dining area in one corner because I love eat-in kitchens. We have an island floating in the middle that creates a practical work triangle, with fridge, stove and sink, in a more compact context within the larger footprint.”

Dropped ceilings that had been added to hide botched plumbing attempts were removed, allowing her to take the transom cabinets up to the original ceiling height; bringing the kitchen back into perspective and making it feel bright, spacious and alive. Crown molding proved helpful in solving the problem of rooms out of plumb.

The opposite of breaking large rooms into smaller, useable spaces is designing small, narrow spaces so that they don’t feel cluttered or confining. Julie points out that a lot of people think that if you have a small space, you need to furnish it with small things.

“I love working in small, existing homes.

Big new homes are easy, but when you have a pre-existing home, and frankly up here in New England there are a lot of small, early homes, there are challenges. And I love to work within those envelopes to create solutions.”

This past spring, she worked with a client who owns just such a home. The rooms in the original Cape portion of the house were small and the library was long and narrow to boot. She notes that there are a lot of long, skinny rooms up here, and while capturing lake views may have been a determining factor in their layout, they present an interesting challenge when it comes to actual use. A dining table that accommodates more than four people or sectional sofas might not be an option, but multiple seating arrangements go a long way toward solving the problem. For this client’s library she created an elongated seating area with large leather-clad Morris chairs. She put all of the weight on one wall, like a galley.

Over the course of a varied relationship with design, it makes sense that Julie would end up in interior design. Drawing on her experience as a professional problem solver, following her father’s advice on observation, and circling back to her appreciation of boat design have all informed her interior design from a very practical sense. She researches what other designers have done, views a lot of spaces, and breaks down what she sees as having been done “correctly” and what has been done for the sake of the visual experience, noting that those two things don’t always align. Her formal career required her to take a lot of information and pare it down into a concise package; to look at chaos and pull a precise little nugget from it. That same skill allows her to look at a large house and be able to pare it down, or look at a buggered-up kitchen and see how to streamline it into a nice, logical space.

“One thing that came out of working in industry is that I was good at what I did, but I wasn’t having fun. The inn was fun and J. Decor is fun and I want to continue having fun, but when our lives are out of balance it’s not fun. There’s more to our lives than hit repeat, play again.”

With that in mind, she and Rick recently made the decision to close the retail end of J.Decor so that Julie can focus solely on the design end of the business with both large and small-scale design projects. Rick is retiring but will happily be around to help with heavy lifting. To arrange a design consultation, call 207.647.5555. R

Facing page: the apothecary at J.Decor. This page: owner’s apartment kitchen at J.Decor (top), owner’s quarters at Noble House Inn (middle), client library and living room (bottom)