146 States Point RoadSaint George, ME 04860Price: $695,000

Set on a granite pier at the edge of Tenants Harbor, this 3-season cottage became the place one local family measured the year by. Each spring they returned and stayed through fall. The youngest among them learned to swim here, right off the granite, and the late-summer sunrise over High Island became the image that carried them through winter. Long before the house was here, the granite pier served another purpose: stone quarried here was shipped into the wider world, prized for its strength and dependability. In time, the pier became another kind of foundation, holding decades of life on Long Cove and Tenants Harbor. The house is deliciously unselfconscious, a true Maine cottage in the old sense-rustic, unfussy and deeply comfortable, with very little standing between daily life and the ocean outside. Its design was deliberate, but time is what made it precious and has given this place made of wood, glass, metal and granite a patina no architect could have planned. The Atlantic Ocean performs for you all day: lobster boats hauling traps, sailboats slipping toward Port Clyde, osprey working the water. Friends arrive by boat and tie up to the old bolts set into the granite.There are views here that resist real estate language. They are too immediate for "panoramic," too changeable for "picturesque," and too extraordinary to be reduced to a list of islands and horizons. This is Tenants Harbor at its most elemental: granite, salt water, working harbor, islands, weather and light. And the cottage does not compete with any of it. That is the whole point. Its appeal is not perfection. It is proximity. Immediacy. The feeling of being completely inside the place rather than simply looking at it. Bare feet on old floors. Puzzles, books and kayaks and collections of shells. Towels drying on an old apple tree. Boat rides to town, shooting stars, sunsets and sunrises, paths through the woods. It is a place you miss before you have even left.