The fence at 7 Church Street is not going to be built.
The Farmington Historic District Commission approved it on May 19, along with the gutters, as the last exterior details on a house that had been coming before the commission in stages since March 2025. A picket fence along the Church Street frontage, half-round aluminum gutters, and a certificate of appropriateness, which is the permission slip the commission issues after it votes. The file could close.
On July 21 the owners came back and said they would rather skip the fence and expand the landscaping instead.
That change did not go through the same door. It arrived as an item in the town planner's report rather than as an application, which means there was no hearing, no motion, no vote, and no new certificate covering what will be planted in place of the fence the commission approved. Whether a change to already-approved exterior work requires a new application is not a question anyone raised, and the record does not answer it.
What the commission got instead was a conversation, and by every indication a friendly one.
Town Planner Shannon Rutherford walked through photographs a colleague had taken that morning, shot from the road and then from the property line and then zoomed in by degrees, to show what is actually visible from the street: an electric meter, some vents, and an air-conditioning unit at the rear corner of the house. The air conditioner is the real target. The tightest shot, Rutherford noted, is "not necessarily reflective of what you're seeing from the street."
Some screening is already in, though Rutherford narrated it with the hedging of someone reading her own labels off a photograph. Winterberry, she thought, was on that side. Holly is in. A dogwood is going in, she assumed. Two apple and two pear trees stand at the front. From there she offered two ways to finish it: shamrock inkberry set at an angle to the house, or white rhododendron.
Commissioner Joanne Lawson wanted one thing pinned down. She raised a recent approval on Carrington Lane, where the owners had noted their screening plantings were evergreen rather than deciduous, and asked whether the same held here. It is not a small distinction. Screening that drops its leaves in November stops screening anything until spring.
The answer arrived in pieces. Rutherford was sure about the rhododendron and said she would have to look up the inkberry; another voice at the table supplied that inkberry is evergreen; Rutherford landed on "I think they're evergreen." Commissioner Michelle Phelan vouched for the rhododendron with the only botany of the evening. "I always call them mother nature's thermometer," she said. "They fold up in the winter."
Nobody wanted the fence. "I actually think I prefer this over a fence," Chair Jay Bombara said, adding that the house is fine as it is. Commissioner James Calciano said the lot is already beautifully landscaped and draws comment from people walking by. Rutherford told the owners to proceed with whichever option they liked.
The owners were in the room the whole time. Rutherford said so at the start, and said they were available for questions. Nobody asked them any. Bombara polled his commissioners, the commissioners talked with each other and with the planner, and at the end the owners were thanked for being careful people in the historic district.
The commission is entirely capable of being formal about this exact question. A month earlier, on June 16, it approved a propane tank and generator at 2 Carrington Lane for Bob and Ann Louise Price, and it attached a condition to the approval: vegetation had to be added or replaced so the units are minimized from the street. Motion, second, unanimous, written into the minutes. At Carrington Lane, screening was a requirement. At Church Street, it was a preference.
The difference is not that anyone did anything wrong. The Prices had filed an application, so there was something to vote on. The 7 Church Street owners had already been approved and were asking whether they could do less than they were permitted to do, which is not obviously an application at all.
Rutherford also made the substantive case, and it is a better argument than the informality of the item suggests. The approved fence was a picket fence about four feet high. It was never going to be opaque. Evergreen shrubs planted at an angle to the house will, in time, screen the air conditioner more completely than a fence you can see through. "It seems like a reasonable exchange," she said.
What it leaves is the district's most-documented house in an odd position. The commission has issued a certificate for a fence that will never exist, and the thing going in instead is backed by four commissioners agreeing it sounds better.
The afternoon's other business ran the opposite way. The commission held a hearing and voted to approve an oil tank and screening panel at 772 Farmington Avenue that had already been built before anyone applied. One owner did the work and then got the vote. The other had the vote and decided not to do the work.
The Mercury reported in May that the 7 Church Street saga was nearly over. That was optimistic. Sixteen months in, the house is built, the gutters are on, and the last open question is which evergreen goes next to the air conditioner. 🏛️
This coverage is supported by Farmington Storage, 155 Scott Swamp Road, the only storage facility in Connecticut with Museum air. Sixteen months is a long time to think about a fence you have decided not to build. It is a short time compared to how long most people hold onto furniture they are not currently using, which is roughly where the Museum air comes in. 860.777.4001 📦
Jack Beckett has covered Farmington's land-use boards long enough to know the file is never closed, and that he was wrong in May to suggest otherwise. He is on his third coffee. ☕
The Farmington Mercury covers the town nobody else is covering: the commission that meets at five in the afternoon, the arrest log that is technically public record but that you would never find unless someone typed it up, the zoning fight that will change your commute in four years. We publish slowly, deliberately, and without apology. Our motto is "Always last to breaking news" and we mean it, because by the time you read this the vote is taken, or in this case never was, and the facts are checked. Find us at farmingtonmercury.com and tell your neighbors. #WeAreFarmington 📰