🔒Building Business: Freeport builder turning former brewery space into its new headquarters

Fine Lines Construction is moving a bit further south from its current location at 194 Main St./U.S. Route 1 in Freeport to a much larger facility at 8 Varney Road. The custom homebuilding company is renovating the 7,000-square-foot former Stars & Stripes Brewing building into a facility that can accommodate both its offices as well as a cabinet and millwork shop. (Prior to the brewery operation, which closed in 2024, the property had been home to Lincoln Canoe and Kayaks, which in 2014 moved its operations to Amesbury, Mass.) Ben Duplissis, owner and president of Fine Lines Construction, purchased the 1.9-acre property last year. His current site is 1,200 square feet. Duplissis said the new space is incorporating “super energy-efficient details. [It’s] not totally passive house standards, but we’re wrapping the building in foam insulation and installing high-efficiency windows and doors and heat pumps,” he said. Founded in 1987, Fine Lines has grown to a team of 35. The company currently has projects in the works or in the queue in Freeport, Brunswick, Harpswell, Poland and on Peaks Island in Portland.

Construction news from around the state

Sanford’s 105-year-old former Jagger Mill is being reborn as an 86-unit apartment complex by Newmarket, N.H.-based Chinburg Properties. The 70,000-square-foot brick building will feature a mix of studio, one-bedroom and two-bedroom market-rate apartments. Total cost of the project will be $17.6 million, over $2 million of which is being spent on replacing the four-story mill’s 260 windows, with historic replicas of the building’s original panels. The restorations were built by Universal Window and Door, headquartered in Marlborough, Mass., and installed by Falmouth-based Rich Exterior Solutions.

Westbrook Development Corp. is partnering with the city of Biddeford to build a 40-unit affordable housing complex at 37 Barra Road — the first phase of the nonprofit’s broader housing development plan for Biddeford. Thatcher Brook apartments will offer a mix of one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments. The project team includes Portland’s Kaplan Thompson Architects, South-Portland-based Gorrill Palmer civil engineers and AlliedCook Construction, headquartered in Scarborough. Financing includes support from MaineHousing’s Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program, a Tax Increment Financing arrangement with the city of Biddeford, tax credit syndication through Evernorth, based in Portland and Burlington, Vt., and from the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston and Maine Community Bank.