Coastal classic

"It still has that same feeling," Madeira said, gazing out a rear window at the lupine field behind her sea blue-shuttered house, which she made her permanent home in 1978. "It isn't suburbia."

The sight of Madeira on her bike adds to the sense of continuity that has kept the Eliots, Peabodys, Rawles, Rockefellers, and other families returning for summers ever since the village was first popularized as a vacation spot in the late 19th century.

The Pastime Theater, Mrs. Flye's Sandwich Shop, and the Mt. Desert Apothecary with its soda fountain are gone but residents can still buy brooms, nautical charts, and other standbys at F.T. Brown on Main Street. There they can catch up with the proprietors of the century-old hardware store, Tom and Frederick "Buddy" Brown, and eye the stuffed guillemot, cormorant, and other seabirds displayed in glass cases in back.

At the Kimball Shop & Boutique, run by the same family since 1931, shoppers will find plush towels, porcelain cookware, cashmere sweaters, and ballet flats. At The Romantic Room across Main Street, they can check out the latest "Lillies," pastel-print dresses named for Palm Beach socialite Lilly Pulitzer who first designed them to conceal citrus stains while tending her juice stand in Palm Beach in the late 1950s.

That an entire commercial block on Main Street and most of the village's surviving old inns and summer homes were designed by one man has helped preserve the hamlet's character. American architectural historian John M. Bryan's handsome tome "Maine Cottages: Fred L. Savage and the Architecture of Mount Desert" (Princeton Architectural Press, 2005) is too big to carry around, but the coffee table book is a walking tour of more than 70 surviving structures designed by the local sea captain's son from 1886 to 1924. They range from the grand old Asticou Inn, which presides over the harbor, to a shingle-style cottage, Rosserne, overlooking Somes Sound.