Why relocating creative types are finding new homes on Columbia’s courthouse square

Hip to Be Square
By JIM RIDLEY @COUNTRYLIFEBLOG
October 22, 2015 NEWS » COVER STORY

Also part of the Scene’s Gimme Shelter issue: stories on a YWCA program that puts victims of abuse in homes they can call their own, a small business that makes home furnishings while giving folks in need a leg up, a tour bus company with some big-name clients and the award-winning home of Mayor Megan Barry and her husband Bruce.

Kim Hayes and Joel Friddell recently bought a residence, an office space and a large room with high ceilings that they plan to convert into a gallery. They’re all part of the same property — 2,400 square feet in all, built in the 1920s or earlier, with an upstairs, a mezzanine and a spiral staircase. There’s no telling what such a property would fetch in The Nations, Germantown or East Nashville, given the right zoning. columbia-6279

In Columbia, Tenn., they bought it for $180,000.

The site that housed White’s Camera Shop for 21 years and its roughly 7 million negatives will need a lot of work, Hayes admits, leading visitors up a steep back staircase past two indifferent cats, lots of unpainted drywall and an enormous Deardorff portrait camera dating back to the 1920s. But when they’re finished fixing it up, she believes they’ll literally be on the ground floor of Middle Tennessee’s next magnet for relocating creative types.

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