My New Home: Couple’s decision to stay in area leads to dream house in Collierville
Chad, Rebecca and Ella Cullison have plenty of room to grow in their Collierville home.
Buying a home is a big commitment for anyone to make.
But for Chad and Rebecca Cullison, it meant more than committing to a house and a neighborhood. It meant committing to a city.
They bought the home in Collierville’s Planters Ridge in April 2010. Chad said, “It looked like a good, stable neighborhood, so we liked that.”
The Cullisons made a few cosmetic changes to the 3,160-square-foot home including a warm, tan wall color for the living room. Rebecca said her goal was to create a warm environment: “We wanted to make it just really comfortable.”
Previous owners had upgraded the kitchen of the home, which was built in 1996, with granite countertops.
A sunlit casual dining bay off the kitchen has room for two side chairs.
Baby Ella’s nursery is decorated in a girly pink-and- green theme.
“We got married in 2007, and for the first 2 1/2 years, we lived in an apartment in Cordova,” said Chad, optometrist and owner of Cullison Eye Care in Germantown. “We didn’t know what we were going to do long-term, if we were going to stay here or not.”
Neither Chad nor Rebecca grew up in Memphis. Chad, a native of Pocahontas, Ark., came to the city in 1998 for optometry school. Rebecca, from Clanton, Ala., came to Memphis in 2004 to work at Methodist Le Bonheur-Germantown, where she now serves as assistant administrator.
Two years ago, though, they felt ready to settle down and call Memphis home. They started searching for houses in Germantown and Collierville near their jobs, and at first, things seemed to be going their way. They found a Collierville house they loved and made an offer.
“We were dead set on it,” Rebecca said. “That was our house.”
Only it wasn’t. The Cullisons were outbid.
“We were really down,” Chad said. “We gave up for a while, took a step back. We thought maybe that was God’s way of telling us we were not supposed to stay here.”
As it turned out though, it was just a matter of timing.
Chad, who had always planned to open his own practice, found his opportunity in a space off Houston Levee Road on the Collierville-Germantown border and opened for business in November 2009. Once he settled in, the Cullisons renewed their home search, and this time the pieces of the puzzle fell quickly into place.
“We looked for maybe two to three weeks, tops,” Rebecca said.
For help with their search, the Cullisons called Kelly Jo Graves of Keller Williams Realty. In no time, Graves had helped them narrow the field to a few houses. Rebecca, who learned in the midst of the search that she was pregnant, began researching schools.
“We liked this house,” she said of the four-bedroom, 3 1/2 -bath home in Collierville’s Planters Ridge neighborhood that topped their list. “But the ultimate decision came down to the school.”
The couple purchased the 3,160-square-foot house — near daughter Ella’s future elementary school — in April 2010 for $279,000. They made a few cosmetic changes, then moved in one month later.
“It looked like a good, stable neighborhood, so we liked that,” Chad said. “And we really liked the exterior and what the previous owners had already done with the house.”
The house, built in 1996, had undergone upgrades that included granite countertops in the kitchen and a textured wall treatment and new freestanding vanity in the half bath. All the Cullisons had to do was customize the wall colors, update a few fixtures and decorate.
For that, they called in designer Melinda Key, a friend of a friend who had already worked with Chad to pull together his new practice.
“When she was doing Chad’s office, we knew when we got a house we would want her to help us do it too,” Rebecca said. “She basically picked everything out.”
The open living and dining areas are painted a warm tan. Three round columns separate the formal dining room from the entry, and the room is accented with cream, tan and brown draperies. The dining table seats eight, and a large china cabinet showcases the china Rebecca had never had space to display.
A staircase, which the couple had refinished, separates the room from the main living area. In the living room, built-in bookcases flank a slate-tiled fireplace. Above it, a large painting with a splash of bright red provides a focal point.
Throughout the living room and kitchen areas, the Cullisons installed bamboo shades and custom window treatments. In the kitchen, an eat-in area includes a bay large enough for two banana-leaf side chairs, a dining table and an open cabinet that displays a collection of white dishware.
The room also features granite countertops, stainless steel appliances and a tiled floor and backsplash. The Cullisons painted the space a soft green-gray.
In the downstairs master suite, blue and brown bedding and contemporary furniture will soon be accented by new bedding and draperies. “That’s what we’re going to focus on next,” Rebecca said.
The mocha-colored master bath features tile floors, a split dual vanity and a corner tub with separate shower.
Upstairs, one small room functions as a home office. Across the hall, a light, bright guest room contains a suite of furniture that once belonged to Rebecca’s great-grandmother.
A Jack-and-Jill bath connects the guest room to Ella’s nursery. In that space, a bright pink and green piggy bank provided the starting point for a girly room that features tone-on-tone striped pink walls, green-and-white curtains and a green chair and ottoman with bright pink piping.
Rebecca said her goal was to create a warm and friendly space. “We wanted to make it just really comfortable, where it feels like home,” she said. And home it is. The Cullisons have no more questions about where they’ll stay for the long haul.
“After our bad experience a couple of years ago with not being able to close on that house, the negotiations on this house actually went very well,” Chad said.
Added Rebecca: “It was just like it was meant to be.”
