Meridian Hills Window Treatment, Indianapolis, IN

Local Window Treatment Experience in Meridian Hills

A false start, a post war rush, and a modern replat

The plat record has a hole in the middle of it. A Meridian Hills plat was recorded on 16 May 1912 and then vacated, with the county layer carrying the note that it was vacated on 4 December 1923. Wellington Heights was subdivided in 1923 by Oscar Schmidt with the first Colonial style home built there in 1924, the country club was built in 1924 and 1925, and the town incorporated in 1937. The real build out is post war and the recording dates prove it: North Meridian Hills on 27 July 1944, Stout's Meridian Hills Addition Revised on 20 February 1946, Buddenbaum's on 4 April 1949, S J Kagan's Meridian Hills Homes on 24 November 1951, Bartholomew's 75th Street addition on 30 July 1952, Meridian Hills 1st and 2nd Sections both on 7 October 1954, Meridian Hills Meadows on 20 October 1955 and Stout's on 5 February 1959.

The census decade counts match that shape exactly: 64 units built 1939 or earlier, 139 in the 1940s, 269 in the 1950s, then a long quiet stretch of 46 in the 1960s, 23 in the 1970s, 12 in the 1980s and 24 in the 1990s, before 59 in the 2000s, 39 in the 2010s and 9 built 2020 or later. A Williams Creek Estates Meridian Hills L161 Replat was recorded on 29 April 2021. There's no single production builder anywhere on this record. It's custom builders and architects through the post war decades and infill and teardown replacement builders working the large format market now, with 92.8 percent of units single family detached.

Three casing regimes, and a ravine under most of them

The 64 pre-1940 units and the 139 from the 1940s have real wood jambs with applied casing and counterweight pockets in the frame. The 269 units from the 1950s have shallower frame jambs and, on the wall carrying the wide low front opening, a broad unbroken run with minimal reveal, which is where an inside mount runs out of depth first. The 107 units built since 2000 are drywall return with generous depth and no applied casing at all. A crew working a 1953 ranch and a crew working a 2019 replacement house four doors down are doing different trades, and pricing them the same way would be wrong.

The ground is the other variable. The town sits on high ground overlooking the White River to the southeast and Williams Creek to the northeast, laid out through existing woodland on curving residential drives off North Meridian, North Illinois and Spring Mill. Adjacent houses face materially different directions, so there's no orientation rule that holds across the town. What is consistent is canopy: planting from the 1940s and 1950s is now seventy to eighty years mature, so most glass here is filtered before it's shaded. Ravine lots also move differently from flat clay, because slope drainage doesn't settle evenly, so a three point measure and a diagonal on every opening is the default in anything pre-1970.

What we specify in Meridian Hills

The specification splits by decade rather than by budget. In the 1940s and 1950s stock the work is about depth, wide runs and rooms that look into mature trees, and the products that suit are ones that mount cleanly outside a shallow opening. In the post-2000 houses it's scale, reach and consistency across a lot of glass, which is where whole house drapery and motorization earn their place. Because 97.2 percent of these houses are owner occupied and most owners stay, it's worth specifying for the long term rather than for a resale.

Streets, landmarks and schools

The town is bounded by Williams Creek, College Avenue, 71st and 64th Streets and Spring Mill Road, about nine miles north of downtown on high ground north of the White River. North Meridian Street is the spine and how residents describe getting downtown, with Spring Mill Road, North Illinois Street, Morningside Drive and Bow Lane inside. Holliday Park, 80 acres deeded to the city in 1916 and taken into the park system in 1932, and the Meridian Hills Country Club of 1924 and 1925 both predate the town's 1937 incorporation, so the amenities came first and the municipality organized around them. Park Tudor School, formed by the 1970 merger of Park School and Tudor Hall, sits physically inside the town. Public schools are MSD Washington Township, with one block falling in Indianapolis Public Schools.

A town with ordinance authority, and covenants we could not read

No homeowners association covers Meridian Hills as a whole. The town itself has ordinance making authority under IC 36-3-2-5, appoints its own police officers, and publishes municipal codes, ordinances and resolutions along with guidance on fences, setback and zoning and on right of way. Whether any of that reaches an exterior awning or an exterior shade was not established, and we won't describe a standard we haven't read. The other possible source of restriction is a recorded covenant on one of the individual plats, particularly the named enclave developments, and none was read either. What we can settle is the public review question: the Indianapolis Historic Preservation Commission's map layer returns no feature carrying Meridian Hills, all seventeen of its districts sit inside Indianapolis, and this is not Indianapolis, so no certificate of appropriateness applies to anything here.

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