Chase and Sarah Morrill: How They Met, Built a Life, and Ended Up in Italy

TLDR: Chase and Sarah Morrill met as students at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine — the only college in the country that offers a single major called Human Ecology.

They married on August 13, 2005. They raised four children in a restored 1850s farmhouse in Wayne while Chase ran a renovation business with no website and Sarah directed a school health center.

The show changed the economics of everything they were already doing. In 2023 Sarah walked onto a balcony in Fossalto, Italy, and they knew they had found their project. I

n 2026 they are opening a 12-room bed and breakfast in Monmouth and filming a new Magnolia series about it.

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When Chase Morrill was a student at the College of the Atlantic, he had already decided on names for his future children. Not shortlists. Specific names, regardless of gender or future partner.

Sarah has told this story on the family podcast with the fondness of someone who found it charming rather than alarming. She met him around age 19. He was already Chase in the fullest sense.

The Only College With One Major

The College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine offers exactly one major: Human Ecology. The program is defined as the holistic study of the relationships between human communities and their natural, social, and built environments.

There are no traditional academic boundaries. Students take courses across disciplines and design their own course of study within that framework.

Chase graduated in 2000. Sarah was there around the same time. The tight-knit campus — situated between Frenchman Bay and Acadia National Park — is the kind of place where everyone knows everyone and shared values tend to pull people together quickly.

For Chase, Human Ecology translated into a career preserving historic Maine structures rather than tearing them down. Community planning in action through adaptive reuse and sustainable building.

For Sarah, it informed her work in rural community health, focusing on the whole person in a small-town setting. The philosophy they absorbed at COA became the foundation of everything they built together afterward.

Chase’s senior project at COA was a physical renovation of a portion of a historic mansion on the campus, converting it into a student lounge. Tearing into the original structure, he was struck by the quality of the timber and how long it had held up to Maine’s coastal climate.

That experience solidified what he already suspected: old buildings were worth saving.

Wayne, Maine Before the Cameras

After college and a period of travel, Chase and Sarah settled in Wayne, Maine, a small town in Kennebec County. Chase founded Kennebec Property Services, a restoration and construction business focused on historic camps and cabins.

He had no website. No social media. Clients found him through word of mouth — often specifically through Sarah, because she was easier to reach.

They purchased an 1850s farmhouse that Chase later described as a teardown. They saved it instead, restoring it into a family home that eventually housed two dogs, two cats, two rabbits, and a chicken named Henrietta.

Chase’s pre-television life had a specific texture. He cut his hair and shaved his beard once a year in early spring using old dog clippers.

He won free beer for a year in a Pabst Blue Ribbon sculpture contest with an entry called The Drinker — a figure sitting on a 30-pack, his deliberate nod to Rodin, constructed entirely from beer cans.

He used the prize money to install the septic system at the family home.

Sarah built her nursing career in parallel, eventually becoming the Director of the Maranacook School Based Health Center in nearby Readfield, managing primary care, mental health counseling, and community health programs for students in a rural district where getting to a doctor could mean a parent taking half a day off work and driving 30 miles each way.

Four Kids and the Juggle

Chase and Sarah have four children — Maggie, Nori, Eva, and Fletcher — born over roughly a six-year span. By 2023, their oldest was 16 and their youngest was 11.

Sarah testified before the Maine State Legislature that year on school healthcare access while running the health center and managing the household.

Their approach to the logistics has been integration rather than separation. Chase brought the kids to job sites. The construction sites became classrooms. Sarah’s school schedule allowed her to be home for afternoons and evenings.

They do not speak much publicly about the daily mechanics of managing two demanding careers with four children in rural Maine, which is perhaps its own kind of answer.

Chase has credited his father Eric, who died of cancer in July 2014 before the show premiered, with teaching him how to be a loving husband, father, friend, and hard worker.

His father’s influence on how he thinks about family is visible in how he talks about Sarah and in how he is now bringing Fletcher, Maggie, Eva, and Nori into the business.

When the Show Arrived

Maine Cabin Masters premiered on the DIY Network in January 2017. Chase had applied out of curiosity when a production company came looking for a Maine crew specializing in old cabin renovations.

The pilot was filmed at a pondside camp in Vassalboro. It ran. Then it kept running — 12 seasons, a move to the Magnolia Network, an Italian spin-off, a podcast, a retail store, a taproom.

The early seasons kept the family mostly off-camera. The adjustment to television was gradual. Chase had to change his grooming schedule — shifting from the annual dog-clipper shave to regular haircuts every few months to maintain visual consistency for the production crew.

He kept the old clippers at home, noting he might return to his original routine after the show ended.

The most personal episode the show has produced was Season 7’s “A Cabin Tribute to Mimi Eva,” which documented the crew restoring a historic cabin on Annabessacook Lake in Monmouth, Maine — a property that had once been owned by Bette Davis — as a tribute to Sarah’s late mother and grandmother Eva.

Custom kitchen cabinets, hooked-rug pillows from a local Maine wool works, and art pieces made by family friends and the children.

The show became, in that episode, exactly what Chase had always said it was about: preservation as a form of love.

The Balcony in Fossalto

Chase and Sarah had talked for years about buying and renovating an old Italian property in retirement. In spring 2023, a television producer learned about the plan and the network pitched it as a spin-off series.

They decided to do it now, while all four children were still living under one roof.

They contacted a realtor looking for a fixer-upper in the Abruzzo or Molise countryside — large enough for six people plus a dog, with good bones and a budget around €100,000. In June 2023, the family toured properties in the region.

They found a 100 to 200-year-old stone home in Fossalto, Molise, set on 7.4 acres with olive trees, a pizza oven in the garden, and four balconies.

The deciding moment came when Sarah walked onto the second-floor balcony and saw the sweeping view of the valley.

That was it. Negotiations with 13 co-owners across 23 separate land parcels followed.

The property cost $97,000. The crew renovated it in three months with local Italian contractors, navigating seismic engineering requirements, limited lumber options, and Italian heritage preservation law.

The six-episode spin-off Maine Cabin Masters: Building Italy documented the process.

Chase called Sarah the MVP of the project on their podcast. Sarah posted a note to fans afterward thanking the Italian village, local businesses, the Maine crew, and everyone who supported them across continents.

She called it a blessing to have their own place in Italy. The family has returned multiple times since. The olive grove yields approximately 40 liters of custom olive oil annually.

What They Have Said About Each Other

On Chase’s birthday in 2022, Sarah wrote publicly: “Since our first travels together across North America to our latest travels across the world, life with you exceeds all expectations.”

Chase’s expressions of appreciation tend to be more practical — crediting Sarah as the organizational anchor of the Italy project, describing her as essential to how the family business actually functions, pointing to her as the reason clients could find him when he had no website.

Their public dynamic is easygoing and aligned rather than performative. They do not need the cameras to like each other.

Twenty years of marriage, four children, a restoration business, a school health center, a television show, an Italian farmhouse, and a podcast is a fairly clear demonstration of a shared direction.

Waters Run and What Comes Next

In 2025, Chase and Sarah purchased the Waters Run property in Monmouth, Maine — a historic 1800s farmhouse that was once part of a 2,000-acre estate owned by the Woolworth family and later became famous in Maine’s harness-racing community for breeding and training championship horses on its lakeside carriage trails. The trails were known as the Waters Run.

After extensive renovation by the Maine Cabin Masters crew — electrical and plumbing upgrades, new cabins, preserved historic features, local artisan finishes — Waters Run Bed and Breakfast opens in July 2026.

The property has 12 suites and cabins, an event barn for gatherings of up to 300 guests, and a head chef already in place.

Sarah is the founder. Chase is the co-founder. A new Magnolia Network series, Maine Cabin Masters: All Inn, will document the process.

Sarah has described the B&B as full circle for a couple that has always been inspired by travel: “We’re inspired by travel.

And having a place where we could now welcome people in their own travels felt full circle.” The focus is off-the-beaten-path Maine — lakes, mountains, local artisans, local food — rather than the coastal tourist circuit.

Waters Run is 15 minutes from the Kennebec Cabin Company headquarters and the Woodshed in Manchester. The two operations will feed each other. The children are already involved. The eleventh generation of Mainers is learning to run a restoration business, a retail store, a taproom, a podcast, an Italian property, and now a bed and breakfast.

For more on the Maine Cabin Masters cabins you can rent and the Kennebec Cabin Company headquarters, those pages cover both in detail.