AMost Norman Rockwellian Home

This picture-perfect Colonial Revival in Portland’s West End is ready for a new family portrait.

You’ll know you’re home when you find just the right display spots for your heirloom antiques and armorial Chinese export porcelain in the sanctuary known as 11 Fletcher Street, a classic retreat surrounded by parks and gardens. Your next nest was built in the early 1920s, when Colonial Revival meant unquestionably quiet comfort. “You feel the difference the moment you enter the front door,” says

BY COLIN W. SARGENT

John Hatcher of Keller Williams, comparing this to later versions of the style. Inside, you’re welcomed by a lovely wide foyer leading to a hallway with coat closet. Here you’ll linger as you greet family and friends with delighted laughter and hugs. The gracious stairway ascends to an upper gallery; all four corner bedrooms open onto this airy space, echoing with countless “Good mornings.”

What A Place To Curate Your Life

The spiral on the graceful turned handrail guides your gaze southeast to the fabulous grand salon that beckons with a central fireplace. A French door opens to a covered veranda on the river side of the house. A few steps lead to the enclosed garden and patio space paved with bricks. A privacy fence encircles the house, a charming buffer from the park and playground next door.

To the left of the stairway, owner DeCourcy “Dick” McIntosh, 80, has fitted the formal dining room with bookcases. “After I went to Exeter in the late 1950s, I went to Harvard, class of 1965, where I majored in English and read a lot in art history.” He’s the former director of the Frick Art and Historical Center in Pittsburgh, now called The Frick Pittsburgh.

We pass through the butler’s pantry with original cabinetry so inviting it ought to be registered as an entertainment space. The honed granite was installed by Kirsten Pulkkinen and her son, the owners from 2015 to 2020. “The butler’s pantry is my favorite place in 11 Fletcher Street,” Pulkkinen says. “We chose the house because of its location, essentially surrounded by Waynflete, where I’d graduated and wanted to share the experience with my son. We put in new wiring, the new kitchen, the tiled bathrooms, the new brick pathways, and the new fences.”

Pulkkinen purchased the house from the estate of the unsinkable Helen Lolly Webber, according to her obituary an interior designer, gourmet cook, and graduate of the Parsons

School of Design. Webber and her husband, a former naval officer, began their grand tour here in 1967.

Pulkkinen says a stranger once stopped her on the street: “‘You live there now? Oh, the martini parties this house has seen!’”

The Tour Continues

You pass a door to a small porch as you enter the sunlit kitchen. The back hallway also leads to this galley with plenty of space for a table and chairs, beadboard cabinetry, and stainless-steel appliances including double wall ovens.

Everywhere you look, the details are dreamy down to the doorknobs. The first two levels glow with original hardwood floors, wainscoting, and chair-rail molding. All 3,000 square feet are well considered: there are 3.5 baths, two with walk-in showers, one en suite. No space is overlarge or overdone.

“The green paint in the kitchen is Farrow & Ball, an English paint,” McIntosh says. “It’s also Farrow & Ball paint in the living room. That shade is called Fowler Pink, named for the 20th-century British decorator John Fowler.”

Asked about the Chinese export armorial china collection adorning the salon, including a matching tureen, he says, “There’s more in the kitchen. It’s from the Eyre family, my maternal grandmother’s family [who settled on the Virginia Eastern Shore in 1623]. The porcelain was ordered in 1800. There are many, many more pieces. Their source is Eyre Hall [dating to 1760], on Cherrystone Creek across Chesapeake Bay [from Yorktown and Gloucester].”

The uniformed figure in the portrait is “my father, [Major] David G. McIntosh. He participated in the Normandy Invasion. He was in the 29th [Infantry] Division of the U.S. Army, an artillery officer. The portrait was painted after he got home, but places him in Jülich on the [Roer River].”

The painting commemorates a historical moment. Will 11 Fletcher be your historical moment?

Getting Your Bearings

You’re just a few honks from downtown and the Old Port, but also just off Danforth Street for a quick getaway to I-295.

Glimpses of the Fore River sparkle from the second and third floors (the latter could be a perfect family game room or painting studio with its own full bath); at night you can see the cars traveling over Casco Bay Bridge. Two of the bedrooms have views of Danforth Street and the matching set of stone dwellings nicknamed “Teddy’s Teeth.”

Nothing breaks the spell of Colonial Revival here. Well, almost nothing. You probably wouldn’t be allowed to build it now: “There’s a coveted 1961 two-car garage,” Hatcher says.

My Cell Rings

On the screen? Pamelia Strayer. What an honor. One of the original occupants and witnesses to the house’s legacy!

“My parents brought me home to 11 Fletcher Street as a newborn,” says Pamelia Deering Strayer, 93. “I lived there until I was 20.”

Her father, the dashing Philip J. Deering Jr., Dartmouth ’23 (the son of 3-time Port-