Seven Acres at the End of First Street

Sep 11

You feel the plateau before you see it. Somewhere on the climb toward Altamont the air changes, the hardwoods close in over the road, and the radio starts to go. Grundy County is the kind of place where the county seat has a courthouse, a couple of churches, and not much traffic to speak of. Savage Gulf is down the road. So is Greeter Falls. People come up from Chattanooga and down from Nashville on Saturday mornings with hiking boots in the back seat, and most of them have no idea that anybody lives up here year round.

First Street runs back into Hunters Ridge Estates and dead ends. At the end of it there is a house on 7.4 wooded acres with a stream running through the property that does not quit in August.

I have walked a lot of rural listings in Middle Tennessee. This one is doing something I do not see often, and it is worth explaining before I get to the square footage.

The part that matters

The property is approved for three different things. It can be somebody's house. It can be a short-term rental. It can be a commercial use. Most rural properties can be one of those. This one can be any of them, and the approvals are already in place.

That sounds like a technicality. It is not.

I spend a fair amount of time arguing that the biggest threat to rural land is not density. It is land getting chopped into pieces that are too small to farm and too big to mow, sold to people who will use them one way and one way only. A parcel with a single permitted use is a parcel with a single buyer pool and a single exit. When that use stops working, the land sits.

A property with three approved uses is a different animal. The next owner does not have to decide right now what this place is. They can live in it for three years and rent it for five. They can run something out of it in the summer and close it up in January. They can rent it while they figure out whether they want to retire up here. The zoning does not force the question.

That flexibility is also what rural counties need more of. Grundy County has real visitor traffic because of Savage Gulf and Greeter Falls, and visitor traffic only turns into local money if there are places to stay and things to buy. Every property up here that can legally do more than one job makes the county a little more durable.

What the house actually is

Single level. 2,268 square feet, three bedrooms, two baths, built with a mountain-modern approach and a good bit of Acadiana borrowed into it, which is not a combination I expected on the Cumberland Plateau and which works better than it sounds.

The living space is anchored by a three-sided stone fireplace and hand-hewn beams left exposed. The windows are floor to ceiling mahogany and they swing out, so the whole wall opens toward the woods.

The kitchen is built for people who cook in front of company. Ten foot dolomite island with a waterfall edge, workstation sink, lit glass cabinetry, a butler's pantry, and a coffee bar set apart from the main run so nobody is standing in the way.

The primary bedroom has its own fireplace and its own deck. The bath has a two person walk-in shower, a freestanding stone tub, and a bidet.

Outside there are covered decks facing the woods and the stream, a fire pit patio, and a natural stone waterfall feature.

The house is sold furnished. Turnkey, in the literal sense. Somebody could close on a Friday and take reservations Saturday.