History of La Posa Estate

Every home has a story…

and La Posa’s is stitched together with beauty, resilience, and generations of love.

Long before it became a beloved summer retreat, La Posa was part of something much grander.

In the 1930s and ’40s, legendary beauty entrepreneur Elizabeth Arden chose these very shores of Long Pond to create Maine Chance—America’s first luxury destination spa.

With mirrored salons, paraffin baths, flower-filled gardens, and pink china, Maine Chance welcomed society women and Hollywood stars seeking rest and renewal. Celebrities including Judy Garland and Ava Gardner came to unwind, rejuvenate, and indulge in Arden’s signature regimen.

This tucked-away corner of Central Maine became a place where beauty was not just skin-deep, but drawn from the peaceful power of nature.

Legendary beauty entrepreneur Elizabeth Arden was the original owner of Maine Chance, which included La Posa Estate.

After the spa closed in 1970, the property changed hands. An Italian gentleman named Mr. Russo owned it for a time, but eventually, it was divided and sold at auction.

The parcel that included La Posa Estate was given by our grandfather as a gift to our grandmother—a bold, creative woman with a deep love for fashion, costume jewelry, and men’s vintage suits. She filled La Posa with color, character, and movement, converting parts of the spa into long-term rental apartments and transforming former spa bathrooms into cozy kitchens. Her days were filled with music, dancing clothes, and carefully curated drawers of jewelry—still lovingly organized in the attic, one color per dresser.

As our grandmother’s health declined with Alzheimer’s, our mother, Linda Todey, moved to Maine to care for her—and for La Posa, which had sadly fallen into disrepair. Vandalism had destroyed some of the estate’s original marble fireplaces, and the once-grand home was burdened with a heavy mortgage.

But Linda, alongside our father, poured her heart into the land and the legacy. She repaid the debts, restored the buildings, and re-imagined La Posa not as a memory of what once was, but as a living, breathing home once again.

In 2003, La Posa briefly relived its golden era when it housed cast members filming Empire Falls—even Paul Newman himself made a cameo on the grounds.

A promotional exercise photo taken on the shores of Long Pond at La Posa Estate.

In 2024, our mother officially passed La Posa into a family cottage trust, and we—her five children—are now the stewards of this cherished estate.

We spent our childhood summers here, barefoot and busy, helping our mother and grandmother with endless renovation projects—scraping paint, moving furniture, restoring what time had worn.

Today, with eight grandchildren running through the grass, La Posa remains a living story, a labor of love that’s always in motion. There is always a project underway, something to mend, tend, or restore—but that is part of its charm.