A SCANDINAVIAN SAGA LITA JUDGE

grew up in a house with eagles and otters, and roadkill in the fridge,” says Lita Judge, as we settle around the antique French farm table that serves as an island in her buttery-yellow kitchen. It’s a provocative sentence, but even so, I’m distracted by the deep serenity of this room, the somehow familiar look of the raised breakfast nook with its bank of windows facing Pack Monadnock.

The familiarity is quickly explained: The scene bears an uncanny resemblance to the cover of Carl Larsson’s Home , a book I studied obsessively when it came out years ago. Lita, a writer and artist with more than 20 children’s books to her credit, often cites the 19th-century illustrator’s impact on her life. In fact, before she and her husband, Dave, began building here, they visited Larsson’s house in Sundborn several times—open to the public, it’s frequently called “Sweden’s most famous home”—pacing out its rooms and then running outside to record the measurements (no indoor photography permitted). opposite : “My husband and I looked at old houses and loved the sense of history,” says Lita Judge. “But I also wanted to build something personal to my story.” above : The airy kitchen at the couple’s custom-designed home.

There are other head-snapping influences here, too— like the 65-million-year-old fish fossil inlaid over the stove, a reminder of a long-held interest. “When I was 15, I wrote to the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology [in Alberta, Canada] and asked to volunteer on a dinosaur dig,” Lita says. They accepted her; years later, she became a geologist and a paleontologist.

The brilliant parrot squawking nearby? Also perfectly in keeping. Born on a Tlingit Indian reservation in Ketchikan, Alaska, and raised by ornithologists, Lita grew up surrounded by wild creatures. It also was her back door into eventually becoming an illustrator. “I was always observing and drawing. I didn’t think of it as ‘art.’ Growing up, I was just supposed to take notes about what I saw.”

For their first Christmas together after meeting at Oregon State University, Dave brought Lita east, and they went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “It was my first art museum,” she says. “The art was incredible. I burst into tears. I realized I was doing the wrong thing.”

Which, in a roundabout way, brings us to the dining room, a delicious replica of Larsson’s in yellow, green, and chili red. The walls are lined with paintings: Paris, Venice, Saint Petersburg. “I felt like I was too old to go to art school,” Lita says. “So we came up with a plan. We went to Europe, and I learned by copying paintings. We went three or four times a year, and used everything we earned from selling those paintings to go back. But we always saved one. This room is a gallery of our memories.”

The move east was a fluke. In 2002, Dave’s work as an engineer brought the West Coast couple to Boston, where “we jumped in the car to find Abbott Thayer’s studio [in Dublin]. We liked it in New Hampshire. That night, we decided to move.”

And a year later, they decided to build. Although Lita had sketchbooks filled with artists’ homes and studios, in the end they used a modified version of Larsson’s floor plan. “I had 98 pages of detailed drawings,” she says. “But we had to economize: his 16 rooms to our seven.”

Choosing a builder, though, was easy. “All of the builders kept looking at Dave when we were interviewing them,” she says. Grinning, Dave adds,

“The builder we chose knew not to look to me. This was Lita’s house.”

The dining room looks exactly like Larsson’s. So does the “memory hall”—a skinny corridor that leads to the studio and is lined with illustrations from Lita’s children’s books. A moose careens down a snowy hillside under a studio,” Lita says, pausing on the threshold. The feeling of cathedral space and uplift is anchored, at the far end of the room, by a huge Gothic window. “And I felt that when I built it, I’d do my mature work. I didn’t want to have any regrets.”

When they started building in 2003, she’d been painting for 10 years. “I was happy, but my secret wish all along was to write and illustrate books for kids.” The studio wasn’t even completed when Lita sat under that domed ceiling and wrote her first children’s book. It was rejected, but she got an agent. And when she wrote her second book, it was not only accepted but also critically praised: One Thousand Tracings: Healing the Wounds of World War II a full moon in Red Sled . A wide-eyed baby giraffe from Born in the Wild stares out from the wall. A page from Good Morning to ME! shows their real-life parrot, Beatrix, suffering an embrace from their Persian, Luna.

Today, the studio walls are filled with arresting ink drawings, punctuated by massive storyboards. She’s making final tweaks to an illustrated novel that will be released this February: Mary’s Monster: Love, Madness, and How Mary Shelley Created Frankenstein . A bank of north-facing windows lights the work desk, like a romantic stage set from La Bohème. Still, the eye-catcher is that imposing Gothic window, from a convent in northern Maine—a detail Lita had drawn into the plans before they even found it.

The buildup is like a visual drum roll. “I always knew someday I’d have

Below sits a 1774 wing chair that is said to have been a wedding gift to Lita’s great-great-great-great-greataunt, who married John Adams’s son. It’s been passed down among the women in her family. She calls it her thinking chair. “So much of our house is about honoring the past,” she says. And it does. But the house also achieves exactly what Lita set out to do: create something uniquely personal.

“You build the space that speaks to your heart, and then the work starts bubbling up.”