While she technically lives alone, there’s always someone coming and going from Sharon Fussell’s Lookout Mountain home, whether that be one of the Pilates instructor’s clients coming for a workout in her home studio, or a Covenant College student heading to class while staying in one of her spare rooms for the semester.
It’s not uncommon for Fussell to have a full house around the holidays, and she loves to host visiting artists performing with the Chattanooga Symphony and Opera. “It’s just fun to have a big enough house that you can do that,” she says. “It’s something I will miss if I ever size down.”
Sharon and her late husband David Fussell moved from Missionary Ridge to Lookout Mountain when they purchased the house next door to where their dream home now sits in 1998. They updated the existing house, which was built in 1952, but it was the land – four and a half lots overlooking Rock City on Gnome Trail in Fairyland – that really attracted them to the property. “My father was in real estate and always had a value for land, and he instilled that in me,” she says.
She and David had always envisioned eventually breaking apart and selling pieces of the property. So after living in the existing house for almost a decade, they decided to sell it and build the home in which Sharon currently resides on the adjacent land. “I have absolutely the most wonderful street,” she says, adding that most of the residents are very friendly with one another and sometimes host neighborhood parties.
One of those neighbors, Beth Soloff, had recently built on her own property, inspiring the Fussells to craft a dream home of their own.