Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce have finally won approval for the privacy hedge at their Ohio home, after months of scrutiny from a small village board that made the most famous couple in America wait for their shrubs.
The couple, who married at Madison Square Garden on 3 July, own a lakefront house in Bratenahl, Ohio, a small village on the Lake Erie shoreline. Their plans for a six-foot fence in black powder-coated aluminium had already been approved unanimously on 8 September, after they revised an earlier eight-foot design downwards. But the planting that would screen the property still needed a second vote.
The village board had the final say
That vote came on Tuesday 10 November, when the village’s Architectural Review Board met at the Bratenahl Community Center and unanimously approved the couple’s revised plans, according to Page Six. The plans include 10-foot shrubs planted for privacy, along with updated brickwork around the property.
The board, which meets on the second Tuesday of the month, had spent the autumn working through the details, including a century-old sewer pipe and the question of whether the structure was a wall or a fence. Swift and Kelce did not attend the November meeting, sending their architect instead.
No lawsuit, no appeal, no moving date
According to reports, there is no lawsuit and no appeal on file, and neither Swift nor Kelce has said anything publicly about fences, trees or sewers. No moving-in date has been announced for the couple, who are heading into their first Thanksgiving as a married couple.
The day before the vote, Page Six ran a piece in which a local resident said the criticism of the couple had been blown out of proportion. What the village has now approved is a fence set back from the property line, a front garden, new brickwork and a screen of planting that will take a few seasons to fill in.
For a couple used to stadium crowds and global headlines, the slow machinery of small-town planning proved to be one of the few things that could make them wait.
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