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Sidney Bensimon still can’t get over her dream home in Maine. Every single time she’s sitting on her couch, the water coming into view from the tidal cove, the French doors open to the fresh air, she starts to cry. “It’s so beautiful,” she says, “I can’t believe this is my house.”
And we’re crying too! Sure, it’s one part jealousy, but the other part is just how lovely this space is that Sidney created from the ground up. What's even more refreshing? The house she built didn't come from a trust fund or a wealthy spouse or any number of uncomplicated routes—get Sidney talking about how this or that came together and you might believe she has magic powers. The Paris-born, Brooklyn-based photographer makes finding an ideal location, building a house, and making a home seem attainable. Her story is so encouraging that it might help you realize that your own dream is worth manifesting.
Sidney first started going to Maine because she was dating someone from the Pine Tree State. They would stay around mid-coast Maine with friends, where she met a bunch of like-minded people—many of them fellow creatives based in Brooklyn's Greenpoint neighborhood, just like Sidney.
“We went swimming every day and ate blueberries and went on hikes,” describes Sidney. “Every day my heart felt like it was exploding. I felt so connected to the area.” She had previously been scoping out upstate New York for a town where she could invest in a home. She was yearning to nest, to feel like she belonged. “I travel a lot with my work and felt like if I owned a place I would feel rooted,” she adds.
So she started looking at houses, but everything seemed too big or much too grand to renovate. “My best friend’s dad is a contractor, so she said to me one day, ‘Just buy a property and build a house!’ The idea really inspired me.”
Despite being unsure through the entire process, Sidney took the idea of building a house and went for it: “I didn’t really know anyone who did it this way, and everyone was skeptical of me, but I just kept going.” She found her dream piece of land in Cushing, Maine, and made an offer—it didn’t even matter that the price wasn’t right. “I wanted to pay cash and use the money that I had saved, but that happened to be only about half of what the woman was asking for.” She stuck to her low offer and eventually, amazingly, the owner, a fellow female photographer, relented and let her buy it. “It was everything in my bank account, but she said yes.”
Thus started the magical process of the Stella House. “The universe wanted me to have this house,” Sidney says. And if you still don’t buy it, here follows a list of incredible manifestations: She found a passive house-certified architect, who just happened to be her friend's husband, so they met up once a month for pizza and drawing up ideas; she found a contractor who was easy to communicate with, always on time, and texted her updates every single day; a woman Sidney used to babysit for came to town, took her to lunch, and bought her the dream marble kitchen island she wanted; that same chunk of custom Marmoreal broke during shipping, but it broke exactly where she needed to cut it to fit. The list goes on.