The House on Hideaway Trail

Long before any farm, this was hunting ground shared by the Chickasaw, Cherokee, Choctaw, Shawnee and Creek peoples. After the Revolutionary War it was granted to a veteran named Thomas Edmiston, who sold it in 1800 to Daniel Perkins, one of Williamson County's first commissioners. The Perkins and Baxter families held the land for generations. The Battle of Franklin, in 1864, was fought about three and a half miles south.

In the 1920s the land passed to E. E. Green, a Franklin bank cashier whose land was auctioned after his 1927 embezzlement. Cecil Sims, a founder of the Nashville law firm now called Bass, Berry & Sims, and his partners got 420 acres for $7,320.96. Sims farmed it on summers and holidays, with the Sawyer family as tenants, and named it Cecilwood after his son, who didn't come home from World War II.

Drag the slider to watch Lot 420 from the air, from crop fields to the finished street.

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In 1987 Sims's daughter, Susie Sims Irvin, and her husband sold the farm to the Harlan Company. They kept the white fences along Sims's fields and named it Fieldstone Farms, for the stones that dotted the fields. The City of Franklin approved it in 1989, and 2,137 houses went up over the next six years.

1. 1993April 30: a builder buys Lot 420 for $24,480, the same day as several neighboring lots.
2. 1993September 8: Centex sells the new house to Lee Martin Diclemente Jr. for $124,443.
3. 1996December 20: the Hubbards buy it for $163,500.
4. 1998February 22: open house, asking $179,825.
5. 1998April 6: Bernard and Gail Chiaravalle buy it for $173,000.
6. 2024The county appraises it at $636,600.

Built

1993, by Centex

Living space

1,940 sq ft finished: 1,688 down, 252 up

Outside

Red brick front, attached two-car garage, 240 sq ft wood deck

Inside

Fireplace, three bathrooms

Lot

64 by 101 feet

Neighborhood

Section L: 73 houses, 54 of them finished in 1993

Google's Street View cars drove past four times. Over seventeen years the brick, roofline, windows and garage stay the same. The front trees grow tall, and the shutters change from dark green to blue sometime between 2013 and 2022.

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Bernie's recording studio is called the Hideaway, a name that matches the street. It's very likely the 252-square-foot room upstairs: the studio has a sloped ceiling under the roof, and the second floor is the house's only upstairs space.

He writes and records at home and plays most of the instruments on his solo albums himself. In 2014 he released Hideaway Tales. That June a newspaper review of an album by his longtime friend Koehler, which Bernie co-produced, said it was recorded at "the Hideaway, a studio in Franklin, Tenn." His YouTube channel has a "Hideaway Studio Mini Tour" (2022) and a "Hideaway Session" (2023).

• Which Marin house Gail owned with Winnie and Elliott, 1986-1993. The county index names the buyers and sellers but not the address. Copies of deeds 1986-0065568 and 1993-0027007 come from the Marin County Recorder, 3501 Civic Center Drive, San Rafael (415-473-6092).
• Bernie and Gail's wedding. She was Gail O'Leal on the 1986 deed and Gail O. Chiaravalle by 1993, so it was very likely in between. The marriage record hasn't turned up yet.
• The square footage. The 1998 ad said 2,204 square feet; the county counts 1,940 finished.
• When the studio was built out, and when the shutters went from green to blue.
• The little girl in the Christmas snapshot. Probably Gail, but family memory will settle it.