I’m standing in front of the first kitchen my father has ever made me. It has a sink, a nicely appointed set of cabinets, a compact, two-burner stove, and a small pantry with red knobs where I can put cereal and bread. From outside, a winter sun, brightened by fresh snow, beams in through the window, alights upon the red knobs, and amplifies my aloneness in the room. There are no siblings around; I have the kitchen all to myself. A hush falls over the room as I tip-toe around, inspecting the kitchen. There’s a mechanism over the sink that, when I press it, sends water - actual water - rushing down. Giddy I dunk my head under it, trying to wash my hair the way my mom does. I’m four years old. It’s Christmas morning. My parents and siblings are far away, in some other room of the house, and for a while it’s just me and the magic sink.
I did, eventually, have to share the kitchen set with my three siblings, but on Christmases thereafter, my dad made us each our own gifts. One year he made four wooden swings, with notes carved in loopy cursive on the underside. Another year, we got balance boards, painted primary colors. Later the toys gave way for custom furniture, a row of built-in desks and drawers, lamps of Douglas fir with picture frames built into their bases, and later, bed frames in a strong arts and crafts design. In middle school these handmade creations reached their peak; he and my mom gave us an actual new kitchen, stripping down everything that had been, and replacing it with custom cabinetry and a new floor, a transformed layout, and my favorite, a built-in bench with secret nooks for hiding things. Although my dad’s by now renovated every room of our home, restored every floor, it’s our kitchen, I think, that anchors everything else, and the same is true for many of the homes he’s worked on.
My dad, Rick Romano, is a woodworker. As a general contractor, he owns and operates Papi & Romano Builders, which he founded, with my mom’s brother, Joseph Papi, in 1977, before I was born. Five years later, my dad’s brother Dan joined the team, and around 1990 my dad became the sole owner. Over the years, Papi & Romano has restored and preserved countless historic sites including the Portland Observatory and the Cumberland Club in downtown Portland, offered design/build services for new homes, renovated existing and contemporary homes all over southern Maine, and crafted custom furniture and architectural mill work for varied projects. The company’s recognition includes being named Home Builders Digest’s “Best Victorian Home Builder in Maine” (2020), and Fine Homebuilding’s “Best Small Home of the Year” award (2014); their projects have been featured in Maine Home + Design, Decor Maine, and Down East. Many employees have been with the company for decades.
Because Papi & Romano is a small, family business and I’m a writer, my dad recently asked if I’d write a blog for him. Start with an overview, he said. From your perspective. Let’s just see…
But how to summarize forty-three years of projects, and the contributions of the steadfast crew of woodworkers and foremen at Papi & Romano? Certain jobs stick out: the historic preservation of Hays Cottage - the iconic John Calvin Stevens home on Cushing Island – a job requiring snowmobiles, water taxis, and exceptional resourcefulness, given its remoteness; a total gut-and-transform of a two-hundred-year-old home on Park Street Row; the ultra-modern, Jetsons-style condo in the West End; and the overlooked community building in the East End, now transformed into A+C Grocery, sun-filled and compact.
Because my father founded the company before I was born, I’ve never known him as anything other than a woodworker, craftsman, builder. As a child, I’d watch him perform a spectacular feat of efficiency every Wednesday afternoon, when he’d rush home from his shop, covered in sawdust and paint, and swiftly shower, shave, and put on a button-up shirt for his meeting of the Portland Historic Preservation Board at City Hall. For years, he did this every Wednesday. For several years, he chaired the Board.
Weekends, he and my mom would load us into our VW van and drive through Portland’s West End and Munjoy Hill, my dad pointing out jobsites to us while smells and sounds of the ocean flew in through the open windows. At the same time, in the East End and all over the Hill, he’d point out where he grew up and where our ancestors had lived or still did – his grandparents, cousins, my Mom’s side, too. That’s where Papa caught me smoking my first cigarette, he’d say, grinning. Never smoked another. In the next breath he’d point out a custom renovation he’d done on a Victorian-era home.
In the backseat of the VW, my young brain took these different stories and blended them, blurring their lines. For a long time I wasn’t sure which stories belonged to my family’s history, to Papi & Romano’s, or simply to the neighborhood and its residents. It didn’t much matter to me then, though; Munjoy Hill came alive with these stories. And perhaps that’s the whole point. When you start paying attention to the details of a neighborhood – the people and parks, the homes and businesses – everything appears to share something inexplicable.
After these drives we’d walk Mackworth Island in Falmouth and my dad would do the same thing, with trees. Cedar, he’d say. Maple. See the leaves? By high school, I knew that cherry hardwood colors as it ages, warming up over time to a reddish hue that seems to glow. I knew what the pitch of a roof or the position of its dormers said about its style, what it meant for something to be flush and even what shellac did. My dad’s love for detail taught me how to take care of hardwood floors and what distinguished a Queen Anne from an Italianate.
But it wasn’t just homes. I also learned that the Portland harbor used to come all the way up to Fore Street and that the West End was once considered practically rural, a plateaued park with a view of the White Mountains where people picnicked, a place rumored to have been more appealing to mariners than the oceanfront Eastern Prom because it offered a space they could settle without having to stare out at the sea forevermore. It was considered so remote that people rode horses into town. Now, the old carriage houses are an iconic feature of the neighborhood. This I learned when Papi & Romano renovated a West End carriage house, design-building a kitchen in a space that, after the horse-and-carriage era, was once used as a squash court.
I learned that Munjoy Hill has fewer new homes, fewer single-family homes, having been originally organized into dense, working-class, multi-family dwellings, often for those who worked down the hill building steam engines for locomotives at the historic Portland Company foundry, as my dad’s grandfather had. This I learned when Papi & Romano collaborated with Anne Callender of Whipple Callender Architects to build a new hilltop home, single-family, one of the first houses on the hill designed to be affordable and energy-efficient from the ground up, using new technologies such as solar heating to deliver a home in step with a sustainable environment.
Most everything I know about Portland, I’ve discovered through the homes Papi & Romano has restored or built. This isn’t so much a reflection on the business but on the power of homes: they are the spaces which hold not just our individual pasts but the hopes and practicalities of the collective past, the dreams and sometimes shortcomings of the neighborhood’s history, its old codes and mores. Often, homes call on us to imagine that past, to imagine why things were designed a certain way. Yet they also call on us to imagine our future. They are the places we renovate – the old familiar places we make new, again and again.
I used to get nervous every year around Christmastime, worrying that my dad would forget to make us something. He didn’t have time, I’d think. I’d find reasons to sneak into his shop, hoping to find him in the middle of sanding a swing or easel. When I entered the shop, the sweet smell of wood shavings would set me at ease, and sometimes there’d be the pleasant roar of the table saw and I’d have to stand there patiently until my dad, through his ear and eye protection, saw me, shut off the machine, and invited me in. Other times – most times – I’d catch him standing silently over a drafting table, a yellow Ticonderoga pencil in hand, his eyes just staring, lost in his drawings, not noticing me. What is he doing?! I’d think. He’s definitely forgotten this year.
Yet every Christmas morning, there was something. Something I hadn’t even known I’d wanted.
This, I think, is the real thing of it, the real magic of a builder or craftsperson; they can imagine a toy or a room or a whole home, draw it, and build it into being. When you grow up seeing that over and over again, it really is magic. It makes anything seem possible. A builder can transform homes into something new or restore them to what they’ve once been. As an adult now I see it goes beyond the built object, the built home. Being a builder seems to mean that you take the time to understand exactly how a person dreams of interacting with their space and then, as one Papi & Romano client put it, “make those dreams structurally and aesthetically perfect.”
Home builders draw on some essential drive we all have – the desire to change our surroundings, sure, but more, the desire to feel we belong in the spaces we inhabit. Magic still, absolutely.
Written by Zoë Romano: https://zoegoesrunning.wordpress.com/