Butler-Tarkington Window Treatment, Indianapolis, IN

Local Window Treatment Experience in Butler-Tarkington

920 acres, ten developments and two completely different populations

The bungalow belt and the Meridian corridor share a neighborhood name and very little else. Bungalow lots are small and narrow, the houses stand close to the street where the streetcar line ran, and the elevations are one and a half stories with banded groupings under broad eaves. The Meridian corridor carries two and three story interwar period revival on mansion grounds. Between them, around the Butler campus, the sourced description is that the houses reflect the Meridian Street mansions on a decidedly smaller scale, which is a fair account of what you actually see: the same architectural repertoire, reduced.

No single production builder worked here. Ten separate housing developments followed the annexation, and the result is a neighborhood that reads as coherent from a car and varies house by house on foot. Median household income is $90,000 against a citywide $66,219, and 66 percent of residents hold at least a bachelor's degree against a citywide 34.9 percent. Butler University and Hinkle Fieldhouse anchor the north end, Christian Theological Seminary sits alongside, and Holcomb Gardens runs down to the Central Canal towpath on the western edge.

Shallow setbacks, deep grounds and one neighborhood name

The bungalow belt gives you banded groupings under broad eaves, front dormers and a wide opening facing the porch. Those banded groups look best under one continuous headrail rather than three separate products, and getting that right means a single finished width with the mullion positions confirmed on site. The Meridian corridor gives you the full period revival range: leaded multi light units, some of them inward opening, Palladian and arched stair windows, fanlights, sidelights, bays and oriels. Masonry reveals on those houses add depth that the bungalows don't have. Around the campus the same shapes appear at reduced scale, so the vocabulary is familiar and the dimensions aren't.

The shallow setback is the physical fact that most changes what we specify. A bungalow standing close to the street has less planting between the glass and the pavement, so more direct low angle sun reaches the front elevation and more of the room is visible from the sidewalk. On Meridian, deeper grounds and mature planting soften both. Along the western edge the Central Canal means canal facing lots back onto open water with no neighbor behind. The residential stock is 85 to 126 years old, so three point measure applies throughout.

What we specify most in Butler-Tarkington

No neighborhood specific median sale price was published for Butler-Tarkington when we last looked, so we won't put a number on the housing here. What we can say is that a 12 to 18 opening bungalow and a 30 to 45 opening Meridian mansion are separated by more than three times the count, and that the mansions carry a higher share of specialty shapes that price and schedule above the standard lines. National ranges put custom shades at roughly $250 to $2,600 a window, drapery $300 to $4,000 and motorized product $300 to $1,500 installed.

Getting around Butler-Tarkington

The neighborhood runs between the Central Canal, Meridian Street, 38th Street and Michigan Road. Meridian-Kessler lies immediately east across Meridian Street, Golden Hill immediately southwest across the canal, and Crows Nest to the north. Butler University and Hinkle Fieldhouse are the fixed points, with Holcomb Gardens running down to the canal towpath and Christian Theological Seminary alongside. Schools split by address between Indianapolis Public Schools and MSD Washington Township, which means Shortridge for some addresses and North Central for others. The Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields sits just beyond the southern edge.

One of the oldest associations in the country, and no authority at all

The Butler-Tarkington Neighborhood Association was established in 1956 to conserve and improve the neighborhood, and it's recognized as one of the oldest continuously operating neighborhood associations in the nation. It's voluntary. It holds no architectural control over your property and it isn't a mandatory homeowners association. There's no IHPC district here either, so no certificate of appropriateness applies to exterior work anywhere in the 920 acres, on a bungalow off Boulevard Place or on a mansion between 40th Street and Westfield Boulevard. No recorded covenant governing window coverings was identified. If you hold deed restrictions from one of the ten original developments, those would be the only enforceable limit, so it's worth a look at your own title before ordering anything that fixes to the outside of the building.

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