It’s one of those pesky, everyday problems that we all confront: How do you build that perfect 5,000-square-foot Mediterranean-style home inside the well-developed city limits of Belle Meade, which does not exactly sport a surplus of vacant lots? Easy. Buy an older, more modest home, bulldoze it and construct the new estate in its place.
In what may be one of the more ostentatious lifestyle trends since the introduction of the Cadillac Escalade, an increasing number of people in the wealthy satellite city of Belle Meade are tearing down old homes and erecting new, larger, more modern homes that look like they were designed to one day grace the cover of the Robb Report or, alternately, to be featured on MTV’s Cribs.
“It is happening more than it has in the past,” says Belle Meade city manager Beth Reardon. “People will buy a lot with a smaller, older home on it and tear it down and start over with a much bigger house plan.”
In fact, even amid a lousy economy, more homes in Belle Meade have either been, or are scheduled to be, torn down this year than any year since such demolition records have been kept. Already, in 2002, eight homes have been razed, with at least three more slated to meet a wrecking ball later this year. In the six years prior, nearly 30 homes in Belle Meade were bulldozed, an average of about five a year.
“We have some single-story homes built in the ’50s and ’60s that, by today’s standards, don’t come close to meeting the needs of a home,” Reardon says. “Most people want a lot more square footage than was being built then.”
In a typical teardown, a rather wealthy, often non-native family will buy a post-World War II cottage or ranch for between $300,000 and $400,000, demolish it and build a more grand structure, usually costing in the neighborhood of between $1 million and $1.5 million. The total price tag will run close to $2 million. Of course, all of that is pocket change compared to Thomas Frist’s new home on Chickering Road, where according to public documents available in Metro and Belle Meade, an older home met an untimely demise to make way for a new $18 million house with 10 bedrooms and more than 22,000 square feet.
Architects and realtors say that the teardown trend is propagated by people who essentially want dream homes at addresses where they know their property values will be secure.
“I think it’s driven by location,” says Allen DeCuyper, a realtor with Legacy Properties who sells many homes in Belle Meade and beyond. “People want to live in Belle Meade, but there are limited housing stocks. If you still want to live there then, you’ll make a decision to buy a home just for the property.”
And yet, while most of the homes being torn down are about as historically significant as a Pizza Hut franchise, not everybody is thrilled by the approach. “All they’re doing is tearing down 1950s-style cottages and building McMansions,” says Michael Emrick, a preservation architect who lives in North Nashville’s Germantown neighborhood. “In many cases, these are not very good homes to start with, but I can’t say the new ones are much better.”
He adds, “in many cases, there is no sense of design. You can see where they’re trying to go style-wise, but whoever is doing it doesn’t know how to put the pieces together.”
The hot style for many of these new estates is the so-called Mediterranean home, which features a wider use of stone and stucco, tile or stone roofs and casement windows. But many in the design community view this new trend in the same manner that music critics view the Counting Crows—as uninspiring and hopelessly derivative. “That’s sort of the fad,” DeCuyper says about the new crop of Mediterranean homes. “People who are traveling to Tuscany and the south of France see these villas and farm homes. The funny thing is that a lot of the homes they are seeing are themselves reproductions, so what we’re doing is reproducing the reproductions.”
Architect Sara Dennis Barton, who has a number of Belle Meade clients, has trouble understanding the recent Mediterranean-style trend. “They don’t have any sort of context in Nashville,” she says. “I think they can be done and be done well, but I haven’t seen any examples of that among the new breed.”
Mark Harrison, an architect with Adkisson/Harrison & Associates, says that while he hasn’t designed many Mediterranean homes, he doesn’t understand why people would be averse to that style. “When people say there are too many Mediterranean homes, that’s an odd comment,” he says. “They need to expand their horizons.”
Harrison says that the few Mediterranean homes he has designed are for “people who are not from Nashville and have brought with them a wave of outside influence that I think has been fun.”
He adds, “it’s a good sign, we’re getting more cosmopolitan than we used to be.”
Retired architect Randall Yearwood disagrees. “Nashville is nowhere near the Mediterranean,” he says. “We have our own environment, and we should take advantage of it and maximize it.”
Sometimes, pragmatic concerns prompt the demolition of an existing house, says Ken Luton, who’s preparing to tear down an old home on in Belle Meade. “We needed a larger home. We have four kids, and we always wanted to build a new home.” His family already lives just a short walk from the new property. Luton says that with children in Harpeth Hall and Harding Academy, his family figured that they’d stay more or less where they are. “It has to do with location. People want to be close to their schools and closer to town.”
Luton says that his newer home won’t have any particular style, although it may have a “French touch to it.” It will be replacing a house built sometime around the 1930s that “could not be renovated.”
But even while some of the teardowns are purely utilitarian, they can still change the character of a neighborhood. “I think the concern I would have from a historic standpoint is just the loss of some of the historic fabric in the neighborhood,” says DeCuyper, a Metro Historical Commission board member. These neighborhoods are made up of a variety of styles of homes over a certain period of time. A ’50s ranch reflects the ’50s era.”
Of course, in some ways, whimsy can also drive teardowns. When Pat Maxwell, the rather prominent plastic surgeon, and his socialite wife, Stephanie, demolished an older home on Chickering to pave the way for their own creation, they invited friends over to have a “teardown” party. There they encouraged guests to help destroy the interior of the house.
The city of Belle Meade has strict restrictions in place to ensure that the newer homes don’t turn Belle Meade into, well, Brentwood. The city imposes regulations governing everything from the height of a new home to front and side yard setbacks to the size of a fence. The city also has a volume restriction based on the size of the lot. A few years ago, a study committee rejected a move to increase restrictions on volume, partly because of pressure from some of the city’s entrenched residents.
But in general, most Belle Meade residents haven’t stormed the Bastille over the slate of teardowns. “We get two kinds of complaints from neighbors,” says Terry Franklin, the city’s top building official. “One, that it’s a shame to tear down something that has character just to build something bigger, and the other is that the site is dusty. But most of the time the neighbors are happy.”
Architect Mark Harrison has a theory about that. “If you own a $300,000 home and someone’s going to build an attractive, aesthetically pleasing $1 million home right next to you, you’re not going to complain that much.”
