An Interior Designer’s Love Letter to Indianapolis Historic Homes

Personality and Pastries That Are More Than Midwest Nice

There’s more to Indy than new builds and neutral palettes. Join us as we tour Fletcher Place and Irvington: neighborhoods full of charm, color, and houses with soul. Bonus: brownie-sharing architects and the best kouign amann this side of Paris.

The SYH team is full of native Hoosiers, but most of us are from South Central Indiana or Bloomington proper, not Indianapolis or its nearby suburbs. Still, Indy has always been part of our lives. 

My parents commuted there for work, so I got to know it through the passenger-side window. And when we’d trek north from our house in Johnson County to Mishawaka/South Bend every holiday, I always begged them to drive up North Meridian Street rather than around 465, a drive I recently took with our exchange student to show her the stately old homes that seem to go on for miles. 

I worked in Indianapolis several summers, interning at the IRT, entering zip codes in a state office near the Capitol Building (for years I could tell you the zip code of every small town in Indiana), and seating customers in a downtown restaurant where I met my first real boyfriend. 

I learned to love the shopping and eating on Mass Ave and the lovely old homes on the Near North side. My prom was at the Murat. 

Back then, we would hang out at Union Station (when it was still vibrant) and then at Circle Centre Mall, before it too went quiet. All this to say: I’ve always had a soft spot for this city. 

This week, the Susans headed up the autobahn that is now I-69 to have lunch with an old friend of Susan Rudd’s, the principal and owner of One Ten Studio, which designs stunning and, rightly, award-winning modern homes. Their adeptness with mass, volume and light results in grounded and inspired spaces for living. And Clete not only creates gorgeous architecture, but also shares his brownie, which is reason enough for us to return.

Among my Bloomington friends, it is known that if anything — kids’ sports, a show, a meeting — takes you to Indy, you leave extra time to swing by Trader Joe’s to stock up, not just for your family but for your friends’. We know each other’s favorites and do distribution runs around town when we get home. 

This time, though, we skipped TJ’s and did an Amelia’s run instead, in darling Fletcher Place, just east of downtown. If you’ve not tried Amelia’s kouign amann, stop reading and go now. We’ll wait.

If you have been to Amelia’s, you really must take a few minutes to drive around the nearby blocks. The homes are charming. Colorful. Often old. Sometimes a little down at the heel (and we love that).

And if you do a little driving tour of Fletcher Place, you might then decide you need more old homes and go a bit further west to Irvington. Oh, how we love Irvington. 

Let me say something possibly controversial: I’d rather drive around indulging in house porn (or, more delicately, shelter lust) in Fletcher Place or Irvington or Butler-Tarkington, SoBro, or Meridian-Kessler than wind my way through golf-course neighborhoods of brand-new McMansions. 

You know how we say that at SYH, we design homes with soul? With all the qualities of our favorite humans? The same qualities we value— depth, texture, intrigue, light and lightness, color, whimsy and warmth — we look for in neighborhoods, too.

Even in neighborhoods that have a few homes that have maybe seen better days or where some yards are overgrown, we slow down and “ooh” and “ahh” about a unique chimney or curved roofline, decorative corbels or the unique profile of a brick porch. A little quirk, a little interest, lovingly fostered, draws us to a home or a neighborhood, as it does to a person. 

We saw so much Architectural Eye Candy on our Homes Tour of the Near East side of Indy this week - and so many homes that need a bit of love but are brimming with potential. 
Moving to Indianapolis? Please, please consider these charming old inner neighborhoods. And then, please! Call us! We’d be thrilled to help bring one of these homes into the 21st century, without losing an ounce of what makes it special. Bonus: another excuse for kouign amanns at Amelia’s.