Justice Barrett selling South Bend home

The South Bend home where Justice Amy Coney Barrett, her husband, Jesse, and their seven children have lived for 19 years is being sold as the family prepares to relocate to Washington, D.C., to be closer to her work at the U.S. Supreme Court.

According to the South Bend Tribune, the Barrett family is selling their brick, six-bedroom, 4,232-square-foot house on Peashway Street.

“I wouldn’t say we had a definite plan of what would happen if Amy was confirmed but we’re at a stage where it seems like selling the house is what makes the most sense for what’s best for our family,” Jesse Barrett told the Tribune.

The home is located in the Harter Heights neighborhood is which just a few blocks south of the University of Notre Dame. Amy Coney Barrett joined the faculty at Notre Dame Law School in 2002. She was confirmed to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2017 and was elevated to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2020.

Within a few weeks of the property being listed, the Barretts accepted an offer from a Notre Dame professor, the South Bend Tribune reported. The house was listed for $899,900.

The Chicago Tribune reported the home was built in 1915. It has six bedrooms, five bathrooms, hardwood floors, a living room with a fireplace flanked by built-in bookcases, French doors that lead to a sunroom and a kitchen with stainless steel appliances. Outside the property has a fenced back yard, covered deck and detached two-car garage.

Jesse Barrett told the South Bend Tribune that moving from South Bend is difficult.

“Six of our babies came home either from a hospital or from an international adoption to that house, so there’s just so many wonderful memories,” he said. “South Bend had been such a fantastic place to raise our kids.”

The Barretts are not the only family leaving South Bend to be closer to new jobs in the nation’s capital.

Former South Bend Mayor and now U.S. Department of Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten, sold their 1905 neoclassical home earlier this year, according to the South Bend Tribune.

Buttigieg, who grew up in South Bend, bought the 2,500-square-foot, three-bedroom house in 2009 for $125,000. The home was in such disrepair, Buttigieg told the newspaper, that it was not “fully habitable” when he moved in.

“Yet the house drew me in,” Buttigieg told the Tribune. “This house had good bones, as they say, and just needed a little work. … Its beauty was faded but not destroyed, and even the textures of its decay were appealing, like the irregular painted flooring of the small back porch.”

Aaron Nichols, the executive director of South Bend Civic Theatre, purchased the house, according to the Tribune.