Window Treatment in Forest Hills, Indianapolis

Local Window Treatment Experience in Forest Hills

Two hundred and thirty seven houses, eleven years, one developer

One family, one developer, one name. Benjamin Stevenson and his sisters held the woods from about 1900, he subdivided in 1922, and the plat went on record on 27 May 1924, two years after the decision. Building then ran hard from 1924 to 1935 with a handful of houses added as late as 1945. That's the tightest build out of any National Register district in Marion County and it produces an unusual kind of consistency: everything here has settled over a comparable period, on comparable ground, so the houses are out of square in similar ways rather than in unrelated ones.

English Tudor Cottage predominates, with American Colonial, Dutch Colonial and Cape Cod filling in. The scale is cottage rather than mansion, mostly one and a half and two stories, brick built. The district was designed as a piece: curvilinear streets over hilly ground, older style streetlights, brick columns marking the entrances. It reads as a gated enclave without ever having been gated. It also sits inside the area residents call SoBro, immediately south of Broad Ripple and northeast of Meridian-Kessler, which means some owners here give three different answers depending on who's asking where they live.

Documented leaded work, brick reveals and a hill

Brick construction gives you masonry reveals with reasonable depth at the main openings, which is the good news. The leaded units are the governing constraint and they override the depth. A leaded unit that opens into the room takes up the space an inside mounted product would need, so no amount of reveal helps. Leaded glass is also more fragile than plain glass, so we keep face fixed hardware away from the perimeter and work off the brick or the framing instead. The arched openings that echo the arched doorways get templated, the same way we handle a shaped head anywhere.

Then there's the terrain, which does something we don't see elsewhere. The streets curve over hilly ground, so a house partway up a slope can have its lower windows shaded by the grade itself while its upper windows sit fully exposed. That's two light conditions on one elevation with no architectural reason for it, and it catches people out when they specify a whole house from one sample. Dormers set into steep slate pitches, and gambrel dormers on the Dutch Colonial stock, add sloping reveals with no vertical face to mount into.

What we specify most in Forest Hills

No median sale price was published for Forest Hills separately when we last checked, and we won't borrow one from a neighboring district. What we can be specific about is the shape of the work: 16 to 24 openings on a consistent cottage scale, with a predictable minority of leaded, inward opening and shaped units that need outside mounts or templates. National figures put custom shades at roughly $250 to $2,600 a window, shutters $175 to $800 and exterior shades and awnings $1,000 to $6,000 installed. Nothing here needs a certificate first.

Getting around Forest Hills

The district runs between Kessler Boulevard, the Monon Trail corridor, Northview Avenue and College Avenue, on the north side. Broad Ripple sits immediately north and Meridian-Kessler to the southwest, and the whole district falls inside the area people call SoBro. The brick columns at the entrances are the easiest way to know you've arrived, and the curving streets over hilly ground make it feel further from College Avenue than it is. Street names inside the district weren't available in the parcel data we could reach, so we work from the address rather than assuming a layout, and the Monon is the route most people use to get anywhere.

Window Treatment Services in Forest Hills

Every service Indianapolis Window Treatments offers across Indianapolis is available to Forest Hills homeowners.

Where We Book Measures Near Indianapolis

Forest Hills is one of several Indianapolis communities we serve. We measure and install across Indianapolis, Marion County, and surrounding areas.

Forest Hills Window Treatment FAQ

Questions we hear most often from Forest Hills homeowners.