Elwyn Brooks White (whose friends called him Andy) never disclosed the location of his home in the pieces he wrote for Harper’s, The New Yorker, The New York Times, or Atlantic Monthly. Only letters to friends concluded with the notation “North Brooklin,” a dot on the map many miles away from the nearest town or city of any appreciable size.

Six months after Andy died in 1985, Mary and Robert Gallant heard that Joel White was selling his father’s property—the clapboard farmhouse rising from a field near the road to town, the towering barn attached to the house in fine New England tradition, and 42 acres of land.

Mary’s state of shock didn’t last long. As she and Robert walked the rolling farmstead they discovered unexpected treasures, including two ponds, a glass-paned greenhouse, and a shaded road curving lazily through the forest toward the shore. But the best surprise of all lay at the end of the road: Mr. White’s weathered boathouse perched above the waters of Allen Cove.

“We were overwhelmed the first time we saw it,” Mary remembers. Though tiny, the boathouse overlooked a grand scene dominated by Blue Hill Bay and the peaks of Mount Desert Island in the distance. Mr. White’s Rube Goldberg–esque contraption for raising the window still worked, and the small writer’s desk he’d built stood just inside the doorway. The boathouse’s stark beauty clinched the deal for the Gallants, and they closed on the property in 1986.

Little has changed in the years since. Mary brought in a few pieces from Katharine White’s kitchen in the main house, including her table and a Hoosier cabinet fitted with drawers and cupboards. She also removed the planks covering the rafters to open up the interior. “Now there’s a greater sense of space and light inside, especially with the whitewashed wooden walls and the bank of windows on the north side,” she says.

She resisted gratuitous changes, conscious that she was caring for a beloved writer’s refuge. “It just seemed we couldn’t improve upon it,” Mary says. The longer she lived in Brooklin, the more convinced she became that this was the right approach.

Henry Allen, caretaker here for decades, told Mary the boathouse had always been simply furnished with few creature comforts. Mr. White kept only a desk and a chair in his private retreat. Each morning Henry would carry a manual typewriter down to the boathouse, and each afternoon before leaving he’d go back down to retrieve it. “I asked why Mr. White didn’t leave it down there and Henry said, ‘Why, then he would have had to own two,’” Mary says.

Like Andy White, Mary and Robert use the building as their private hideaway. They keep kayaks outside the boathouse, and built a fire pit for summer picnics and Sunday suppers. Mary often walks down to the house after working in the garden and opens all the windows before sitting down to read.

“It’s so solitary here, some friends have asked me if the boathouse is full of ghosts,” she says. “I always tell them that if there is a ghost here, he’s very benign.”