The only thing more impressive than the fact that Anthony Esteves, who is 31, built a house from scratch and painstakingly restored another on his family compound on coastal Maine is the fact that he’d never done it before. This is not to say he hadn’t had any training, but it was not the kind you might assume: At RISD, he studied not architecture but sculpture, “which I think now comes through in my work more so than ever,” he says. “I got out of school and figured out over a couple years that the building process was really like my studio practice.”

Other than that, he was armed with only a deep and abiding appreciation for the architecture of both New England and Japan (having grown up in the former and spent time in the latter) and a passion for research.

When the property was purchased, it had just one structure, a 1754 Cape Cod that had been dismantled and rebuilt; he restored it not according to strict historical preservation standards — “I feel like it’s so constricting, and people do things just for the yield,” he says — but, rather, to his “vision of what a historic building should be.”