On the Scene

By Kristen Haynie
Photos By Nino Cocchiarella

Scenic Drive, the aptly named hilltop lane on Evansville’s East Side, is flanked by homes of traditional architecture from the past century. They sit on property originally owned by the Weiss family and in the early 1950s, a son, H. G. Weiss, lengthened the hill to begin further development of the land.

As you approach the home of Greg and Sue Meyer at the end of the drive, a flat roofline barely emerges from below street level. The hidden nature of this home, also built in the 1950s, is only one of its surprises. Another is that from the street, you are looking at the rear of the house. Down the sloping walk that turns to steps, curving to the left of the house, a path takes you to the front patio and door. Continuing on, you come to the woods – two and a half acres that surround this contemporary gem.

In 2004, when Greg, an attorney, and Sue, a reading teacher at Delaware Elementary School, were engaged to be married, Sue was living just beyond these same woods, on Sycamore Street in Fielding Court. Greg Meyer had a small house on Runnymeade Avenue, which he converted to a one-bedroom home after Meyer convinced himself of his continued single life. A friend who’d been helping with the transformation discovered some chairs with a bent tubular steel design and taut leather seats, and said, “Here, you should have these.” A modern take on a traditional club chair, the design was from 1925 by Marcel Breuer. Greg didn’t see a place for them in his bungalow, and they stayed on his screen porch, weathering.

Ten years earlier, Sue had been collecting her own treasures while living in Guangzhou, China. An hour outside of the city in a dilapidated warehouse of sorts, she’d discovered a man named “Mr. Lei,” who was known to the expatriate community as a purveyor of local treasures. Sue and her American friends would make the drive to the warehouse, finding tarnished pots and ornate “lunch boxes.” Mr. Lei would “fix it for you,” as she recalls, and the Americans stored these in their apartments, along with piles of silk rugs, and intricately carved wooden furniture, waiting for the “real” home they would someday have in the States.


So in preparing for their life together, the question of home was one that Sue and Greg had to tackle. It was an inevitable decision they had to make: Where to live? His Runnymeade house was under serious consideration, but try as she might, even with the help of professionals with plans for a new master suite, Sue couldn’t picture living there. For one thing, Runnymeade would mean her young son, Wil (short for Wilson), would be in a different school district away from the friends he’d had since kindergarten. It was during this time of indecision, that Greg was walking Sue’s two dogs, Jack and Riley, in the woods behind her place. Through the red maples and the sycamores, he could see a flat-roofed house that seemed sunken into the landscape around it. As he stepped closer, he saw it was a contemporary ranch with huge windows that looked out into the woods he loved. It was also for sale.

Sue was surprised and excited about the prospect up the hill from her house. Her enthusiasm inspired Greg to secretly make an appointment to see the house without her, as he didn’t want to get her hopes up. But shortly after Greg and the real estate agent stepped into the house at the end of Scenic Drive, they heard voices outside: By coincidence, Sue had decided to show the house to Wil. Once they were all together inside, they knew the house was full of possibilities for a new home.

It’s a sentiment that surely would have been appreciated by Bernard and Elizabeth Noelting, who in 1955 bought the wooded, two-acre lot at the end of the cul-de-sac on Scenic Drive to build a home for their five children – two girls, a boy in the middle, then two more girls. Bernard Noelting worked with his father, the founder of Faultless Caster Corp., but in his spare time, he was an artist. According to his daughter, Becky Shoulders, it was her father who had the vision for their modern home, and architect Jack Kinkel Sr. and builder George Davies & Son, Inc., who brought that vision into being.

The wooded lot was the initial draw for the Noeltings, and Becky and her brother and sisters played in what was dubbed “Fairies Pass,” shooting real arrows with bows at a target their father had provided in hopes his children would play in the great outdoors of their own backyard. Inside, he designed six bedrooms – one for each of the children – plus a master suite with a sitting room that overlooked Mrs. Noelting’s gardens and the woods.

Bernard Noelting died in 1996, and Elizabeth Noelting remained in the family home until her death in 2003. Becky recalled it taking nearly a year just to clear out the house, a lifetime of her family’s accumulations and remembrances taken away. And then it was just a house: A house that needed a lot of repairs. A house with little “curb appeal” since you could barely see it from the curb. A house that you approached from the rear – unless, of course, you were following a path, up through the woods.

It was the Spring of 2005 when Greg and Sue took possession of the home. They gave themselves a year before their wedding, in June 2006, to do the needed repairs, update the kitchen and decorate. Shortly into the project, they realized they needed help. They wanted to stick with the look of a 1950s home, with a retro-modern style, but at times, they weren’t sure what that entailed.

It was David Oldham from Elements Interior Architecture who came to their rescue. Committed to his clients’ needs and the house’s integrity, Oldham began connecting the dots. He asked both Greg and Sue, “What’s not negotiable?” Some items that Sue was not willing to part with were her Chinese “lunch boxes” and the intricately carved furniture from Guangzhou she had collected. Oldham knew that Asian pieces had enjoyed a great popularity during the 1950s, and were, in fact, a kind of status symbol. He also spotted Greg’s Marcel Breuer designed chairs, and knew that with Sue’s collections from China, they had found a perfect setting. From there, other furniture was purchased, reprints of 1950s fabrics were ordered and paint in period colors was applied...