With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bloomingtonians, like the rest of the world, found themselves spending significantly more time at home—working, home-schooling children, or just staying safe. It made us wonder, of the many homes featured in the magazine over the past 15 years, which would be some of the most stylish, most comfortable places to quarantine.
And since, due to COVID-19 safety concerns, we were unable to photograph new places for this Homes issue, we decided to feature our favorite shelters from the storm.
Pictured here are four homes, whose owners, we feel, possess the creative vision that made their homes sanctuaries, even in these most difficult times.
A Modern Home With A Sense of History
Their future home had been on the market for just two hours when Sharon and Brad Fugate stepped inside with real estate agent Scott Owens in April 2012. “We made an offer on the spot,” says Sharon, who with Brad is the former proprietor of the Bloomington store Relish. “We are not impulsive people, but this was so right. We were smitten—it was absolute love at first sight.” Read more.
Hardware Store Modernism
Tucked away on a small side street in an east-side neighborhood, Laura Plummer and Michael Nelson’s ultra-contemporary home stands in contrast to everything that surrounds it. Corrugated steel siding plays games with the sunlight, constantly shifting the texture and structure of its boxy, two-story form with shadows. Every window and doorway pops with bright red trim, infusing the factory-made elements with modern-art spirit. Read more.
A Beauty Well-Preserved on 1st Street
Michelle Martin Colman doesn’t think of herself as owning the home she shares with her husband, David, on East 1st Street. Nor are they merely caretakers for the striking Spanish Colonial Revival house. A more precise term for the relationship she has to the 1920s’ limestone dwelling is that of confidant. Read more.
An Astounding Adaptation
In 1985, when Marsha Herman-Betzen and Keith Betzen told their daughter, Rachel, then 8, they were going to buy a ramshackle, four-story house on 10 wooded acres near Unionville, Indiana, she wept. Marsha recalls Rachel sobbing, “Why can’t we just live in a normal house?”
From leaky roof to flooded basement, the structure was afflicted with broken windows, unfinished subflooring, frozen pipes, and a tattered tarpaper exterior. Read more.
