Deeply Rooted in Bailey Island Maine's Community, Brett Johnson Makes a Life in Interior Design

Lisa Belisle:

Hello, I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to, or watching, Radio Maine. Today I have with me in the studio Brett Johnson, who is a dear friend and also an interior designer and business owner. Thank you for coming today.

Brett Johnson:

Thanks for having me, Lisa.

Lisa Belisle:

I'm so excited to hear about your business, because I know this is the fruition of many, many years of thought and hard work and creating and coming forth with a dream.

Brett Johnson:

Yes, it is. It's really remarkable. About two and a half years ago I fell in love with a building in Bath, and I got in touch with Sean Ireland, a developer who was doing the project, and kind of sold him on the idea of Maine Street Design Co. coming to Front Street, and really having Main Street come back to Main Street. The grand vision is of the Portland design studio and design center being the mothership building, and Bath being the flagship for Maine Street Design Co. Opening the store in the middle of COVID was challenging, to say the least. Simultaneously, it became possible for me to buy Handle It! hardware in Portland. So, in addition to the other MSD co-brands, I branded MSD Co. Hardware, which is within the store in Bath, and that's doing really, really well. So it's a lot of moving parts, but I've got a great team that helps me pull it all together.

Lisa Belisle:

So it's more than just the store. It's really the expansion of the "Brett Johnson empire."

Brett Johnson:

Let's call it the empire, but I think it's the culmination of the MSD Co. brand. And really being able to have a brand that can live on beyond Brett Johnson. There's certainly a portion of the business still that's me, and certainly my design clients seek me out for my abilities to communicate their dreams and wishes in their homes. But really it is building a brand that can live on beyond my ability to keep working as hard as I am.

Lisa Belisle:

Well, I joke about the empire, of course. I mean, I know that you've put so much time and effort into it yourself. So it's simultaneously both you, but also you are empowering your team to work together to co-create this business.

Brett Johnson:

Yes. Absolutely. And that's been a real learning lesson for me too, in my own personal maturity, being able to let go enough. I'm not a parent, but I think there's some similarities there, where people who work for me become people that work with me. And then some of those people at this point are working on their own within the structure of the Maine Street Design Co. But they're really able to realize some of their own abilities and strengths at the same time. So it's kind of fun.

Lisa Belisle:

So when you say parent, you mean the evolution of their skills, kind of starting from a place of learning to moving to a place of maturity?

Brett Johnson:

I think a lot of the people on my team look to me to mentor them. I know Darcy Foche, who's my number one. She wanted to work with me forever and ever and ever. She was raising her boys and being an amazing mom and amazing wife, but she really had a passion and a desire, and she found a way to come to work for me. And she was green as they come, but so energetic and so hungry for the desire. And now at this point, she teaches me things, because she still has that desire to learn and she's doing research and listening to podcasts and really bringing a lot of new, fresh ideas to the firm. So it's really cool. And other people too, on the retail side, have a very similar situation.

Lisa Belisle:

So you have several different elements to the work that you do. You have the retail side of things, but you are still actively engaged in design work. So you're out in the field quite a bit as well.

Brett Johnson:

Oh yes. Ninety percent of my existence is managing my design clients and big projects, and that really is at the core of the business. The other stuff kind of supports it. It certainly feeds it and reinforces the brand. The retail is very on brand, which is challenging sometimes because retail is so customer driven in sort of small segments. So the challenge there is keeping the shop on brand on a regular basis and not letting it stray too much into the kind of gift shop realm. But we do a pretty good job with that.

Lisa Belisle:

When you say on brand, for people who aren't familiar with that, it's a bit of a term of art. You mean things that fit within the vision that you would typically have for your design work?

Brett Johnson:

Right. I like to have things in the store that I would want my clients to have in their homes, and things honestly that my clients want to have in their homes. It's those small final layers of a project that really make it more personal. So that's really the goal. It's not so much personal like my personal taste. But going back to the brand, the biggest part of the brand is the communication of design for other people's ideas. And that's just kind of me being a conduit, and I do the same thing when I buy for the store.

Lisa Belisle:

So that seems like it would present an interesting challenge, because you want things to reflect what other people want, and also you are trying to help them further their own vision. And you're buying things in a little bit of an abstract way, furthering this vision that other people have for themselves, but also that you have for them. It just seems like there's a lot of layers there.

Brett Johnson:

There are a lot of layers there, and sometimes it gets a little murky. Right now the shop is busting at the seams with merchandise, in a relatively small space. How to allow the merchandise and the salespeople to sort of make a statement and tell a story, and to have that story be evident enough so that people want to make those items part of their story. But I lean on my heritage. I'm very happy to have some kitschy things, especially in the summertime, lots of lobster things. We also have, if you need to shuck an oyster, like 20 different oyster knives and things like that. So it's really good. We also have some really cool small Maine artists that we represent in the store that also help us tell the story.

Lisa Belisle:

What is your story when you talk about your own heritage? I know that you went to Mount Ararat High School and the University of Southern Maine, and you have a Bailey Island connection. So play that out, your family story.

Brett Johnson:

So my family's story is kind of interesting. On my mother's side, my grandfather was French Canadian. He worked in a paper mill, but he was also an entrepreneur. My grandparents had a popcorn stand on Main Street in Brunswick. But my grandfather also was a wallpaper hanger. In fact, he lost an arm in the paper mill, and we have a newspaper article that was inside his wallpaper table, which I now have. My aunt gave it to me. There's a newspaper article about him, and he really was the one-arm paper hanger, which was maybe a little morbid, but he was an amazing guy. And then on the other side, I come from a lobster fishing family. My Bailey Island family and my Bailey Island connection, in those generations that preceded me, the town of Harpswell didn't have a high school like Mount Ararat.

So they tuitioned all of their kids to go to school elsewhere. So my grandfather and my great aunt, his sister, were very well educated and worldly. So even though they settled on Bailey Island, they brought a tremendous amount of information back, which I was lucky enough to share growing up. So I love books and literature, and my great aunt was a poet and had lots of artist friends, and Bailey Island really was kind of an artist community. My grandmother painted. I have some beautiful little paintings that she did that are really lovely and cherished. So that, I think, was the spark that drew me back home to Maine, and also helps me to this day tell other people's stories who love Maine and the coast.

Lisa Belisle:

How did the two sides of your family get together? Because they seem, I have a French Canadian side and then I have an Irish Catholic side, and both are Maine oriented, but back in the day those two sides did not mesh. So I'm kind of wondering the same thing about your family.

Brett Johnson:

My French Canadian family moved to Orrs Island. My mom is one of five children. She's in the middle. They bought a house on Orrs Island. They built a motel. And then when my mother and her friends needed a summer job, my grandfather built a coffee shop and an ice cream stand, and they ran it. And my father, being a healthy young man, took a liking to my mother. Actually, he was smitten with several of the young ladies that worked in the coffee shop, but he ended up being with my mom. And that's how the two families come together. Kind of a Grover's Corners small island community story. And our families are very enmeshed actually at this point.

Lisa Belisle:

So if you had made a different choice with another one of the young ladies, then you might not be here today.

Brett Johnson:

Well, that's interesting, because both my parents were engaged apparently to other people from the island. And in both cases, we are friends with their subsequent children, and we're like, you could be my brother, or you could be my sister, but none of us would be here if it was a different pairing. And that's just how that worked out. Everybody picked who they picked, and here we are. But that's also part of the fun, and the realization of just how tight knit a small community is. Nowadays I think people have a lot more options as far as who they end up with, but I'm glad that my parents got together and had three great kids. My siblings and I are very diverse from each other. My sister's a minister and my brother's a boat builder. But we also end up with the same core values that were created on the islands.

Lisa Belisle:

One might think, looking at the piece around your neck, that perhaps this is somehow related to this family background in Maine. However, it is not. You actually went on a grand adventure fairly recently. Tell me about that.

Brett Johnson:

I did. A year out from a major transition in my life where I unpartnered, I had always had a desire to travel, and even though I've done a little bit of it, I found a real need to travel. I ended up with an opportunity to go to Denmark, to Copenhagen, to see a friend, Anna, who lives here in Maine, and her family. She's from Denmark, and she was going to Denmark to be with her family, because she hadn't seen them since the beginning of COVID. And I said, oh, I would like to go to Denmark while you're there. And she said, do it. So the next day, without even telling her, I made a flight reservation on Icelandair to go to Copenhagen, really wanting to go to Scandinavia to kind of feel some of the energy of my Viking route, which I know exists.

So this is going to be like an advertisement for Icelandair, but if all American airlines were as good as Icelandair, we would all have a much better experience flying. Icelandair allows you to add a four-day layover in Iceland to either end of your trip. So I decided, because I'd always wanted to go to Iceland, that I would do a small layover of two days in Iceland, and that was like nothing I'd ever experienced. The greatest thing was the time when the days were getting quite long, so my body clock didn't know what time it was. So of course I stayed up, I definitely found my Viking drinking roots, but also this amazing culture and spirit of the Icelandic people is so remarkable. They are so proud, and they're essentially on a big giant island.

They're pretty much gathered in small communities. And I found some amazing similarities to a way of life that we experience here in Maine. I have an amazing connection, so much that I will definitely go back to Iceland. I'd like to ski in Iceland. I think that would be a fun thing to do. It's a very barren place, but at the same time it's extremely cultured, and they have an opera house, a concert hall that rivals Sydney, Australia. It's amazing that the city of Reykjavík is smaller than Portland. So that was amazing. Then the Denmark time, the 10 days I stayed in Denmark, I rented a lovely VRBO flat in a historic part of Copenhagen on a canal.

And it was romantic, and I saw things in Denmark that were just amazing. It's so European, their connection to the Royal family is so amazing. And then to think about Denmark too, it's like a little island, and you look at the map and you see Sweden and Finland and Norway, and they're ginormous compared to little Denmark, but Denmark is just so small and mighty and proud. And there's also this amazing connection between Denmark and Iceland, because until the late 1800s, Iceland was part of Denmark. And so in Iceland they speak Icelandic, Danish, and English, and they still do that to this day. I put that trip together and I did call it my freedom tour, but it also proved to me that travel is very possible.

Lisa Belisle:

And tell me about this piece you're wearing around your neck.

Brett Johnson:

So I bought this from a street vendor in Iceland, and I saw it six times before I bought it. This was an old fisherman, very stoic and kind and gentle, but big and furry and just a lovely man. And I listened to his stories of fishing and collecting whale bones and whale ivory and other things on the coast of Iceland. And that connection with whaling, which really still exists to some extent in Iceland. With what I know of my family, I resonated with this piece. So I finally, before I left, found him again and bit the bullet. He changed the leather around it, because it had black and I wanted brown, and I watched him tie the knots, and this has not actually left my neck since I put it on there. So it's pretty powerful.

Lisa Belisle:

You told me that he believes that this was from a whale's tooth. It was about 200 years old.

Brett Johnson:

Yep. Which, I mean, 200 years old sounds like a long time, but in Iceland with people who were harvesting whales and things like that, probably not so old. To think about it in the context of its age, and to really bring your brain back to a time when whales were being hunted for all kinds of reasons, and to have that sort of connection to the ocean, it's fun to fantasize about what that might have been like.

Lisa Belisle:

When you are doing design work, do people often bring a connection to the ocean into the work that you do with them?

Brett Johnson:

I think if they live on the ocean, there's no question that that's the case. In the work that I do, it's really important to people that the possessions they cherish in their lives, whether it's antiques or memorabilia or whatever connection that they have to their history, is super important for me to help them incorporate into their design.

Lisa Belisle:

So if somebody is living in the middle of the woods, for example, they might choose different design elements to go along with that.

Brett Johnson:

I think they would, and I would challenge people to make sure that was the case, that their interior is in harmony with their exterior. It's always kind of driven me crazy. I've worked on projects where people buy houses on the coast of Maine. This happened in the eighties a lot. People had all of this sort of Tuscan colorization and faux painting, and I'm like, this is not Tuscany, this is Maine. And the minute you walk in, you feel uncomfortable. For me, maybe because I'm in tune with that, but I can't imagine that people don't feel uncomfortable. And when you bring the harmony and you bring the connection in, then people can relax.

Their brains don't have to get all scrambled with mixed messages and things like that. Now, I suppose if people had traveled a lot and they had little items or little collections that were from their travels, there would be a way to weave those into the story of their house. I'm working on a project in Harpswell right now, and the family, his family is settled in New Sweden, and his great grandfather built a log cabin which his father was born in. The family property was sold, and he had the log cabin dismantled and reassembled as part of a house in Harpswell. And now Scott Simons is doing the addition. So the interior of the core of the house is a log cabin, but it's a cedar shingled house on the water in Harpswell. And Emma and I are working on some new art. She brought in a Barter piece, a great big fabulous fisherman, and curating their collection so that the log cabin has a connection to the water. He's a retired Navy Admiral, so of course there's a lot of that kind of thing. And she has a connection to the lakes, and it's been really fun to deal with the subtleties of that, and also really fun to add to their collection of things that they're being able to do together.

Lisa Belisle:

New Sweden is up more in the northern part of Maine.

Brett Johnson:

I would say it's just sort of northwest of here, like Sweden, Norway. And the other cool thing is that he's a Johnson, so he's a real Swedish Johnson. I have no idea if that's the case with my family, but this log cabin made a big giant trip from the woods, actually a farm in Maine. And Greg, the client, tells a story of how the log cabin got sided with clapboards or shingles, because at a certain point they didn't want to have the appearance of being so poor that they had to live in a log cabin. So they shingled the log cabin, but the inside I think was covered with newspaper or something. But it's beautiful, beautiful space. And from the outside, you would never know that this treasure was inside.

Lisa Belisle:

When you're working with Emma Wilson and the Portland Art Gallery and other artists, what types of things are you looking for in art to complement the design work that you do?

Brett Johnson:

So for myself, a lot of what I look for is palette driven, maybe more than the composition of the painting or the subject of the painting. The palette really is the driver of the whole project. So the art needs to sort of follow suit in that. And sometimes that is actually a disparate thing, where the art needs to create a little bit of tension in the overall concept and the overall feeling of things, and allow a place for the eye to rest and to sort of be transported, where the painting or the art becomes kind of a portal to something else. Sometimes art becomes like another window that people can look into and experience. So the art that people collect and resonate with is a huge part of what I do.

Lisa Belisle:

We have a piece behind us that is Bill Crosby, and you and I were talking before we came on air about the palette in this particular piece. But as you are describing this tension, there's actually some tension in this piece as well. I hadn't thought about that before you brought this up.

Brett Johnson:

Yes. His work has found its way into many of my clients' homes. It's landscape, but they always have this kind of mood to them. It's like what you see if you squint your eyes and you kind of blur things a little bit. So then it invokes this kind of mystery, it allows you to sort of fill in the blanks a little bit. And his palette, even though from painting to painting it varies, there's always this kind of similarity. It's just slightly muted gem tones, which are just so lovely and natural. They never hit you over the head and say, look at me, look at me, I'm colorful. So his work definitely speaks to me, and fortunately it speaks to a lot of my clients as well.

Lisa Belisle:

Brett, I know in listening to our conversation there will be people who want to learn more about the work that you do, and also the various elements of your brand, your retail space, the design work. How do people find you?

Brett Johnson:

So we have our design studio at 511 Congress Street in Portland. And we welcome people to come experience our store, our shop, and a lovely branded apartment that I live in in the summer, at 160 Front Street in Bath. Or you can go to our website at mainestreetdesign.com, and that website is ever growing and ever changing and offering more and more.

Lisa Belisle:

Well, congratulations on continuing to evolve your dream and your dream team, I guess. As you move forward with your vision, it's really been a pleasure to catch up with you today.

Brett Johnson:

Yes. Thank you. I do want to close in that I learned something from one of my art teachers in high school, Chris Chapman, and she always said, "Remember, Brett, life is a journey, not a destination."

Lisa Belisle:

Wise words.

Brett Johnson:

I live my life that way.

Lisa Belisle:

Well, I hope to continue along this journey with you in some way, shape, or form, but today I've enjoyed touching base with you since, you know, a COVID-induced few months since we've actually seen each other.

Brett Johnson:

Exactly. It's good to be in close proximity.

Lisa Belisle:

Yes. Well, thank you very much for coming in today, Brett.

Brett Johnson:

You're welcome. Thank you.

Lisa Belisle:

I've been speaking with Brett Johnson, who is an interior designer and lovely, warm person that I hope you reach out to and learn more about, if you are considering your own interior design. If you are interested in hearing about Bill Crosby and other Portland Art Gallery artists, please come join us in Portland or visit the Portland Art Gallery website. I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you have been listening to, or watching, Radio Maine.