John Innes Kane Cottage, an Astor grandson's Tudor Revival estate, rises in front of you at 45 Hancock Street in Bar Harbor, Maine. Built in 1903–04 for John Innes Kane, a wealthy grandson of John Jacob Astor, and designed by local architect Fred L. Savage, this imposing Tudor Revival summer estate is one of a small number of estate houses to escape Bar Harbor’s devastating 1947 fire. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1992.
Set on nearly a 4-acre parcel on a bluff overlooking Frenchman Bay near the village of Bar Harbor, the house rises as a large two-and-a-half–story structure. Notice the stone through the first floor and the wood-frame upper floors finished in half-timbered Tudor Revival style. The plan is roughly L-shaped, with a complex cross-gabled roof whose gable ends are decorated with vergeboard and pendants below the roofline and finials above, while the eaves flare at the edges.
On the landward side the western façade presents the entrance beneath a projecting gable-roofed portico supported by heavy wooden timbers, a memorable welcome for an Astor descendant’s summer house. This bluff-top portico still greets you above the waters of Frenchman Bay.