|Sara Anne Donnelly, Down East|
“Everything here’s a little ridiculous.” Curiosities and cleverly repurposed pieces fill a New Gloucester farmhouse.
“My goal is that this house has character, that it’s unique,” says Jeff Roberts, who bought his 1790 New Gloucester farmhouse five years ago and has been filling it with peculiar stuff ever since. “Everything here’s a little ridiculous. I mean, this is a duck.” He picks up a brass lamp shaped like a mallard with a shade where its head should be. The bird sits on a low, cobalt metal locker-turned-liquor-cabinet in the dining room, which also features a sake pot in the shape of a tuna, two sculptures of Ganesha, the Hindu elephant god, a banner from a Tokyo yakitori shop, a 1970s yellow-plastic serving tray emblazoned with the command “EAT!,” and seven identical white clocks, each displaying a different, arbitrary time. “It makes no sense,” Roberts says. Maybe, I offer, it all makes sense together? He laughs for a while before replying: “Sort of?”
