1. MAY 2016
STYLE AT PORTLAND ARCHITECTURAL SALVAGE THE FAMILY BEHIND SWISS TIME ON STAGE AT THE CHILDREN’S MUSEUM
PORTLAND'S
CITY MAGAZINE
Staff Picks:
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THE CITY10
RAISING A FAMILY OF
CITY KIDS IN PORTLAND
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Giving diners what they want
The City Life
Jason Loring
NOSH, SLAB + RHUM’S

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4. MAY // 2016 37
City
Living,
City
Loving
A FAMILY OF FIVE
CARVES OUT THEIR
OWN SLICE OF
PORTLAND.
by Rebecca Falzano
Photography Myriam Babin
f you walk by a certain house in the
Libbytown neighborhood, the one with
the gated picket fence around the front
yard and the chevron curtains around
the front porch, you might just find one, two,
or all three of the Torrieri boys sitting on the
steps waving at you. Huck, the oldest, calls it
“watching the world go by.”
While some people head for the suburbs once
they become parents, Louis and Meghan
Torrieri are raising their three boys, Huck,
5, Brixton, 3.5, and Scout, 2, to be city kids
through and through. In Portland, this means
embracing life in their small but vibrant city.
A city boy himself, Louis grew up in
Philadelphia and recalls his own time spent
sitting on the stoop of his childhood home. As
an adult, he tried country life for a bit, moving
to Vermont and then living on five acres in
Bowdoin. After traveling to London for work,
however, he found his love for cities reignited
and unrelenting. As a surfer, he was also drawn
I

6. MAY // 2016 39
to the ocean: Portland, he decided, would be
the perfect fit.
Meghan was born in a yurt in Bowdoinham
and grew up in Yarmouth. After graduating
from high school, she went to college in the
Midwest, then moved farther west to San
Francisco, where she lived for a bit before
returning to Maine to be closer to her family.
She purchased a run-down, two-family house in
Portland that had never been renovated, hoping
to flip it. It was built in 1913 and used to be
the home of the city medical examiner. She was
single at the time and the house was too big for
just one person. Then she met Louis.
The two married and began to talk about
starting a family. “I thought when we had kids
that I’d want to move to the suburbs,” Meghan
recalls. “Having grown up in Yarmouth with
a yard, I wanted my kids to have that.” Louis,
on the other hand, remembers when his family
moved out of Philadelphia to the suburbs of
Delaware. “There was this kid who came from
“I thought when
we had kids that
I’d want to move
to the suburbs.
Having grown up
in Yarmouth with a
yard, I wanted my
kids to have that.”
Opening spread: Meghan and
Louis Torrieri sit on the back
deck of their Portland home
with their three boys, Huck,
Scout, and Brixton. “The boys
are pretty happy when we
have our family time here,”
says Meghan. “It’s filled with
dance parties and digging
in the backyard.” Opposite
page: In the front of the house,
the Torrieris turned a sitting
room (“that no one ever went
into,” according to Meghan)
into a playroom (now, a
room that gets a ton of use).
Meghan and Louis installed
a chalkboard panel over the
fireplace opening and hooks
for the boys’ dress-up clothes.
This page: The kitchen was
originally the dining room of
the home. When Meghan
purchased the house with
the idea of flipping it, there
were drop ceilings and wood
paneling over wallpaper on
the walls. When she and Louis
got married, they decided to
turn the house into their own
little family “compound.” “I
came from a family of three
girls,” says Meghan. “All this
boy energy is awesome. It’s
fun and crazy, and it’s always
upside down.”

8. MAY // 2016 41
New York City, and he always saw Star Wars
movies first and had seen John Lennon walking
down the street. I always thought, ‘Wow, it
would be cool to have city kids.’” Meghan and
Louis came to realize that they could have a
little bit of both—city living and some outdoor
space—right there, in their own backyard.
Set on staying in the house, the couple decided
to turn it into a space where they could root
their family. “We call our family the Tribe,” says
Meghan. “We’re kind of trying to make this our
own compound.” Outside, they added a back
deck that functions as an outdoor living room.
Inside, they turned a sitting room in the front
of the house into a generous-sized playroom for
the kids, cleverly covering the fireplace opening
with a chalkboard wall. Upstairs, each of the
boys has his own bedroom, and on the third
floor, Meghan has an office space where she runs
B Merry Events, her planning firm specializing
in weddings and special events.
While the house is quite large, the yard is
modest-sized—just enough space for the kids
to dig in the dirt. When they need to really
run around, they walk over to the nearby park.
“The boys will
stand outside and
say hi to everyone
and wave as people
drive by. It’s that
kind of neighbor-
hood.”
Opposite: The family calls this
room their library/music room.
Walls and bookshelves are filled
with old family photographs
and instruments. The photo on
the wall was taken in Dingle,
Ireland, on Meghan and Louis’s
honeymoon. Louis had a New
York City fashion illustrator,
Richard Haines, sketch the
photos and gave them to
Meghan for their first Christmas
as a married couple. This page,
from left: Brixton’s room features
fabric from Meghan and
Louis’s wedding that Meghan
reused. Her touch as a designer
fills every room. The boys’
bathroom features a claw-foot
tub that the Torrieris found at a
salvage shop on the midcoast
and restored.

10. Opposite: The three blue lockers in the entryway are from Portland’s Flea-For-All.
“It is how we told the world we were expecting a third baby,” says Meghan. This
page, clockwise from top left: In Meghan and Louis’s bedroom a family photo
by Emilie Sommer is the first and only professional photo of their family. The red
leather rocking chair’s original home was in Meghan’s paternal grandfather’s
collegiate room at Penn State University. The lamp was on Meghan’s maternal
grandfather’s desk at his office of McCaffrey & McCall—a New York City adver-
tising agency that created Schoolhouse Rock. The top of the dresser in Huck’s
bedroom. The tiger maple furniture in Scout’s nursery belonged to Meghan’s
great-great maternal grandmother, who brought it from Ireland when they immi-
grated. The mobile in the mirror’s reflection has hung over the crib of each boy;
it is a wedding gift Meghan and Louis’s friends had made of the family’s dogs.

11. 44 OLD PORT oldport.com
In the summer, they love running under the
sprinklers in Dougherty Field. “We don’t need
a big backyard,” says Louis. “We have that field
over there that the city mows, which is nice
because I don’t like mowing lawns.”
While their street doesn’t have many children
living on it, the boys have become friendly
with their older neighbors—Mr. George and
Mr. Raymond, for example. “The boys will
stand outside and say hi to everyone and wave
as people drive by,” says Louis. “It’s that kind
of neighborhood.” And because the old house
was once meant for two families, the Torrieris
have a lot of room for entertaining. “We have
a lot of get-togethers with our friends because
the kids have room, the adults have room, and
everyone can be together.”
Louis is the marketing and communications
director at Amato’s Sandwich Shops and is also
a photographer. The photos he takes of his
family line the shelves and walls of the house;
the day I visit, the annual Christmas photos
are still hanging, documenting the progression
from a couple with two dogs to a family of five
(no dogs). There’s the year they all posed with
a disco ball, the boys wearing crowns; the year
they stood on a couple of skateboards; the year
they posed in front of a drum kit, Meghan
pregnant with Scout, the caption reading “No
more silent nights. Ever.”
The Torrieri house is indeed light on silence—
and sleep—these days, but overflowing with
laughter and love. In the summer, the family
walks to the farmers’ market and the venerable
Tony’s Donut Shop up the street. (“We get
doughnuts a lot,” says Louis. “We justify it
by walking there.”) On Sunday nights, after
Meghan comes home from a wedding weekend,
the tribe hits the beach with dinner in hand.
And they like to take the boys downtown often.
“They love walking around the Old Port; it’s
kind of their thing,” says Meghan. “They like
sitting on the curb; they like going over the
cobblestone streets in the car.” In fact, if the
family drives outside of Portland, to Freeport,
for example, Huck will sometimes say from
the backseat, “Is this the country? I don’t like
raccoons.”
While they love exploring the city, home base is
their favorite place to be in Portland. “We make
no bones about the fact that this is a house
that we love, and it’s all chipped up because
the kids play hard in here,” says Meghan. “We
absolutely let them ride their scooters inside.
We’ll take all the dings in the wall. We’ll take
permanent marker on the white duvet cover.
We’ll take it all, easy. This is us.”
Meghan runs her event planning business, B Merry Events, from her home office on the third floor (formerly where the Portland
Medical Examiner worked). “I get to work with some pretty awesome people inside and out,” she says. “I’m pretty selective
about who I work with because, quite frankly, to take time and energy away from these guys, it has to be a great fit.”