About The Guest Lodge

The Guest Lodge is a red, log-sided lake house with white shutters — each one hand-painted with a single green pine — on the western shore of Santa Claus Lake in Temple, Maine. It has belonged to one family since before it existed.

It started with a canoe

In the 1960s, Rob’s grandfather, Fred Logan Bull (1902–1986), paddled an aluminum Grumman canoe across this water and began clearing a lot by hand. Fred built the majority of the Lodge himself, and his wife Laura — everyone knew her as Betty (1904–1990) — stained every wall and helped in a hundred other ways. There were no roads and no power lines — every tool and every board came across the lake by boat. That same canoe still sits at the water’s edge today, and yes, guests are welcome to paddle it.

See the Lodge being built →  Sixty-two photographs from the family album — clearing the land, setting the posts, cutting the road, drilling the well — each with Rob’s notes.

In 1970, Fred and Betty — with Rob’s father, Robert Logan Bull (1931–2008), and his wife Carol — raised the Lodge and welcomed its first guests. It was Carol who made the Lodge beautiful: she did all of the interior decorating, and it’s her touch that makes it the warm, welcoming place guests fall in love with. A perfectionist stonemason spent nearly two years on the fireplace, packing interesting stones home from his hikes within thirty miles, one or two at a time — every rock exactly as nature made it, and the fireplace cost more than half the price of the entire build. Through the ’70s, ’80s, and early ’90s the finely kept lodge on the quiet lake earned a loyal following; a first renovation came in the late 1980s (the first kerosene heat and insulated water pipes stretched the season beyond the warm summer months), stewardship passed to the family’s third generation — Rob (Robert Alan Bull) and Beth (Adams) Bull, whose own Maine roots run through the Adams and Merrill families of Andover and Rumford — all the way back to Susan Merrill, the very first settler child born in western Maine, delivered in Andover in the 1700s with a Native American midwife attending. — in the early 2000s, and a careful 2013–14 renovation added heat, air conditioning, a full kitchen, and WiFi while keeping the original simplicity and charm. In 2017 the Lodge welcomed the first of the family’s fourth generation — Robbie, Nathan, and Teddy Bull — now being trained up to carry the baton.

Why “Santa Claus Lake”?

The lake’s legal name is Staples Pond. But seen from the air, it is the spitting image of Santa mid-stride with a pack slung over his shoulder — Rob’s father spotted him in an aerial photograph more than fifty years ago, and the name stuck. The road in is called Christmas Lane. Pull up the satellite view on your way here and you’ll see him too.

A legacy of generosity

When Rob’s father, Robert L. “Tall Pine” Bull, renamed the lake in the mid-1960s, it wasn’t just about the shape from the air. He named the surrounding building sites after Santa’s reindeer, painted the Lodge in red and green — and set out to honor the spirit of the original Saint Nicholas: quietly making the lake a place for families who could not otherwise afford a vacation. It’s a tradition Rob and Beth carry on to this day.

Farmington historian and longtime family friend Paul Mills told this story beautifully in the Daily Bulldog — “Tales from some of the Christmas place names in Maine” — a wonderful read on Maine’s Christmas-named places, with the Guest Lodge as its opening picture and Robert L. Bull’s story at its close.

Our vision

The Lodge is now passing into our family’s fourth generation, and our vision is a simple one: to keep making it better, year after year — continually updating it with modern amenities while never letting go of the rustic charm that makes it the Lodge. Many of the families who stay with us are on their third and fourth generation of summers at the lake. Our hope is that the Lodge remains their second home too — a cherished family lake house for their generations as well.

See you at the lake — this summer, and for all the summers to come.