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DINGLEY ISLAND, ME Imagine a wooden womb. It has American black walnut walls. Built-in walnut bookcases. Cabinets with triple tansu sliding doors, also walnut, enveloping the TV and electronics. A Burmese teak floor covered with fine Oriental rugs. There’s even a walnut ceiling complete with a compass rose in marquetry for dead reckoning.
It’s within the compass of these walls that famed furniture maker Thomas Moser feels most at home when he’s home. “That’s my favorite room in the house,” he says of the study, “because it’s like a womb.”
The founder and president of Thos. Moser Cabinetmakers of Auburn, ME, with furniture showrooms in six US cities, including one in Georgetown, lives on an utterly private coastal estate at the southernmost tip of Maine’s Dingley Island.
Visitors must travel down a quarter-mile driveway – past a fresh-water pond to the north and the salty Atlantic to the south – to reach the white clapboard Cape Cod-style house graciously situated on 15 acres, including 2,000 feet of picture-postcard rocky shoreline.
“We are on an island, off of an island, off of a peninsula,” says Moser. “No matter where you look, we’re alone.”
It’s a Sunday morning and Moser, who turned 70 in February, is wearing blue jeans and a black ribbed sweater, a pair of reading glasses hanging from the collar. He still exudes the restless energy it took to build the company that bears his name from a one-man operation in 1972 into one of the nation’s premier producers of Shaker-inspired, handcrafted American hardwood furniture that today employs 90 cabinetmakers.
The thought of retirement is as distant as the horizon.
A decade ago, after raising four sons, Moser and his wife, Mary, left the New Gloucester, ME, home they’d occupied for 21 years for this island haven that took three years to build. The central design principle is that of a typical Cape Cod cottage – a rectangular dwelling with a central chimney and steep gable roof – but the couple’s two-story, 5,000-square-foot mansion is much bigger and much higher. “One of the guiding principles here is to not offend the local aesthetic,” Moser says, adding that’s the reason he chose white clapboards, cedar shingles for the roof, and locally quarried stone for the chimney.
The front doors open into a soaring atrium, and beyond that a living room, whose walls are gridlocked with antique nautical paintings in gilded Victorian frames. Serious collectors of maritime oils on canvas, circa 1850 to 1910, the Mosers own more than 100.
In addition to nautical paintings, the pair collects so-called pond models (water-worthy miniatures) and ship’s models of 19th century sailing crafts that they have dry docked on wooden, drop-leaf end tables such as an 1820 Sheraton with fluted legs and an 1860 Queen Anne with fine pad feet.
Moser’s self-made Lolling chairs in front of the stone fireplace, constructed from cherry with black leather padding, along with the living room’s brown leather sofas, give the home a decidedly masculine feel. Well-appointed Japanese objets d’art such as Satsuma vases and Arita ware, as well as intricate 19th century scrimshaw folk art of whalers made from whalebone, add femininity to the sublime decor.
Although technically a two-bedroom house, the sprawling owners’ bedroom (including Mary’s dressing room-cum-office and his-and-her bathrooms) encompasses the entire second floor. A bowed wall – built to resemble a ship’s helm – featuring eight floor-to-ceiling window panels that offer a kind of widow’s walk view of the rhythmic, rolling approach of the sea, dominates the space.
So, how much wood furniture does a woodworker ultimately keep at home? Plenty, though not all of it his own. Moser estimates that only 30 percent of the furniture in his house was made by Thos. Moser Cabinetmakers, and even those are its misfits: leftovers from academic library projects, prototypes of designs that never went anywhere, or inventory that otherwise would have been shipped to the flagship Freeport, ME, showroom’s discount room due to slight defects.
In addition to the Mosers’ home, the estate consists of the original 1920s cottage where their youngest son, David, and his wife live; a barn that has been converted into a three-car garage and boathouse on the ground floor and a workshop and apartment on the second; and a wharf and moorings used to secure the Mosers’ 18-foot outboard motorboat and 27-foot bass boat.
Nowadays, Moser uses the home workshop only to rebuild and re-gild those antique picture frames or construct pond models. “I don’t use it much these days,” he says, a touch of regret creeping in, “but we designed a lot of things there.”
