Chris Stapleton's House: From West Nashville to a Leiper's Fork Farm

Chris Stapleton spent a decade writing other people's hits before Traveller made his own voice one of the biggest in country music. When the fame arrived, he steered away from the neighborhoods where Nashville money usually lands. He and his wife, Morgane, live on a farm of more than 300 acres in the hills near Leiper's Fork, the unincorporated Williamson County village where the pavement narrows and the horse fences start.

The farm deal came together in early 2017, a little over a year after the CMA night that changed his career. Williamson Source, picking up a Nashville Business Journal report, put the purchase at 311 acres and $5.6M, a 45-minute drive southwest of downtown Nashville. The legacy record adds one more detail: the deal was done through a trust, the standard move for a buyer who would rather not see his name in the county index.

A decade behind other people's hits

Stapleton grew up in eastern Kentucky and started an engineering degree at Vanderbilt before music won out. He landed a publishing deal 4 days after moving to Nashville in 2001. The catalog he built over the next decade ran wide: No. 1 singles for Kenny Chesney and Josh Turner, cuts for George Strait and Luke Bryan, and “If It Hadn't Been for Love,” a song from his bluegrass band the SteelDrivers that Adele carried to a far bigger audience.

The turn came in November 2015. At the CMA Awards he sang “Tennessee Whiskey” with Justin Timberlake and walked out with 3 trophies, including album of the year for Traveller. The album went to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in the days that followed, 6 months after its release.

The house he sold on the way out

Through all of it, home was a 1940 house on 0.4 of an acre in Belle Meade Highlands, the west Nashville neighborhood between the city of Belle Meade and the Highway 70 corridor. Stapleton bought it in April 2010 for $580,000, back when his name appeared on other artists' liner notes and nowhere else.

The ground under that neighborhood has its own long file. Metro planners trace the whole area to the 5,400-acre Belle Meade plantation, dispersed in 1906, and the county plat index records the first Highlands of Belle Meade sections in January and February 1930, with later sections following in 1945 and 1946. Two big pieces of the old plantation went to other uses: in 1927 Luke Lea and his wife, Percie, deeded 817 acres for $1 to build a public park in honor of her father, Percy Warner, and in 1929 Leslie Cheek bought 100 acres and hired Bryant Fleming to design Cheekwood. The Percy Warner Park that came out of the Lea gift still borders the neighborhood.

The county record closes the chapter cleanly: a deed recorded in January 2017 carried the house to its current owners, at $950,000 per the legacy reporting. Weeks after that deed, the local press had him buying the farm.

Leiper's Fork, before the celebrities

The village he moved near has been a crossroads far longer than it has been a getaway. Settlers from North Carolina and Virginia arrived in the late 1700s on Revolutionary War land grants, and traffic on the Natchez Trace grew the settlement into a trade center. Jesse Benton bought land here in 1789, and his son Thomas Hart Benton, later a United States senator from Missouri, moved the family down in 1801. Travelers called the place Bentontown, then Hillsboro; when a post office opened in 1818, it took the name of the creek instead, for one of 2 Leiper brothers, a surveyor named Hugh or a captain named James who died in the Battle of the Bluffs in 1781. The village core, about 18 acres of it, has been a National Register historic district since 1998, and roughly 650 people live there today.

The newer chapter is quieter money. Williamson Source counted Stapleton's new neighbors at the time of the purchase: Justin Timberlake, who picked up land in the area in 2015, along with Nicole Kidman, Keith Urban, and Mike Wolfe of American Pickers. Leiper's Fork wears all of this lightly. The village's main strip is still a few hundred yards of galleries, antique shops, and restaurants.

The log cabin on the main road

The family's most public tie to the village is a shop. In July 2019 Morgane Stapleton opened Tennessee Turquoise in a log cabin on the main road that had housed a White's Mercantile store, stocking vintage turquoise and silver jewelry alongside photography by Becky Fluke, the photographer who shot the Traveller album cover. “I fell in love with turquoise when I fell in love with being out West,” she told Nashville Lifestyles in 2021, describing a personal collection that outgrew her closet. The same profile noted an all-female team behind the counter, with the shop's profits going to the National Indigenous Women's Resource Center.

That is about as showy as the Stapletons get. He sang the national anthem at Super Bowl LVII in February 2023, kept stacking Grammys, and went home to the farm, where the couple are raising 5 children. Nothing in the public record since 2017 shows the family moving anywhere. For the rest of the city's guarded front doors, start with our guide to celebrity homes in Nashville.