A plaque placed at the side door of the George W. Bourne House in Kennebunk, Maine by the Maine Society, Daughters of American Colonists, tells us that "In 1825 the shipbuilder George Washington Bourne (1801-1856) brought his bride, Jane, to this new brick Federal-style home. Inspired by Milan's Gothic Cathedral, Bourne started the house decorations in 1852, using only hand tools. He completed the work shortly before his death. By century's close, the name "Wedding Cake House" was widely applied. The house was completely refurbished in 1983-1984 by Mary and Anne Burnett, first owners not of the family."

A practical tale of home improvement vies with a romantic legend for the truth about the Wedding Cake House, not unlike the way in which the original house struggles under its burden of Gothic frosting. The home-improvement story has shipbuilder George W. Bourne constructing a brick house for his bride in 1826. As an example of late Federal architecture, it had five bays, a hipped roof with a balustrade and paired chimneys, and a Palladian window above the front door fanlight. The simple, rectangular structure was first painted white, then yellow.

Then in 1852, the barn, connected to the house by a shed, burned and fire fighters tore down the shed in order to save the house. Bourne, who was now retired with time on his hands, built a new barn and shed. He had been to Europe and had greatly admired the Cathedral of Milan. The Federal-style house was soon connected to a Gothic-style barn by a shed embellished with five extremely tall, remarkably Gothic looking pinnacles.

Bourne must have realized that something had to be done to stylistically marry the shed and barn to the house. So, he added some unifying Gothic ornamentation: four buttresses with pinnacles support the four comers of the house; two buttresses with pinnacles define the central bay; the front door is framed by a pierced arch with a finial; subsidiary one-story buttresses hold up a cusped and crocketed, trefoil-pierced, ogee arch above the Palladian window; this is topped by a "poppyhead." Two sets of carved cornices support small crenelated battlements. Below the cornices hang Tudor-arched spandrels with quatrefoil- and circle-patterned fretwork. Bourne designed and carved all of this himself, aided only by a ship carpenter's apprentice, Thomas Durrell. In the end, it must have seemed just right to him.

The romantic legend arose some fifty years later when an enterprising Kennebunk businessman published a postcard of the house and entitled it "Wedding Cake House." It came to be said that the carving had been done during long lonely hours aboard ship by a recently married sea captain who had had to leave his bride before he even had time to eat his wedding cake. The legend's romance, while inspired by the desire to make money, provides a "sensible" explanation for the likes of such an eccentric architectural artifact. However, the home-improvement scheme of George Bourne, with its aspirations, displaced energy, persistence, toil, and reward is the stuff of legend, too.