Sometimes, an unexpected find can inspire a vision far bigger than anyone might imagine. A wingback couch spotted in an antiques shop might prove the perfect piece to build a tearoom around. A long wooden bar tucked away in a warehouse could become the centerpiece of a retro-themed tavern. And stumbling across a chained driveway leading to a neglected old house could be the catalyst that transforms an entire town.
In the case of Linda Bruckheimer and Bloomfield, Kentucky, all three have proven true.
The wife of film and television producer Jerry Bruckheimer, Bruckheimer is a writer, photographer, philanthropist, and incidental historic preservationist who has spent the past three decades quietly revitalizing the rural community, one storefront at a time. Visitors today can spend an afternoon in its downtown shopping for antiques, bowling on vintage lanes, dining at Ernie’s Tavern, and exploring other businesses she has brought to life.
It started with Walnut Groves Farm, an 1820s-built mansion on the northern edge of town. Bruckheimer, who was raised in Louisville before moving with her parents to Southern California as a teen, has deep family ties to the Bluegrass State. She was out driving the backroads one day in 1993 when she decided to stop in Bloomfield, about thirteen miles from Bardstown, for a look around. That’s when she came across the Greek Revival home, which the Bruckheimers would eventually purchase as a peaceful getaway in the Kentucky countryside. Presiding over the front drive was a large oak that had survived a lightning strike and would later inspire the logo for Jerry Bruckheimer Films.
Restoring Walnut Groves sparked an interest that gradually drew Bruckheimer beyond the farm and into Bloomfield itself. She acquired an abandoned storefront downtown with an idea to fix it up, and then another. Bruckheimer opened Nettie Jarvis Antiques in 1996, which she named after her great-grandmother. More businesses soon followed, bringing new life to the sleepy stretch of Taylorsville Road running through town.
“I definitely saw a need for preservation, but that wasn’t really my motivation in the beginning,” Bruckheimer says. “Something just got into me. I saw one building, then another, and it simply developed. There was never some grand scheme. It just happened, but everything happened straight from the heart.”
I meet with Bruckheimer on a summer afternoon at Nettie Jarvis. She points out photographs of the building as it looked when she bought it. Daylight streams in through large holes in the walls. The floor is piled with debris. “It was a wreck,” she says. “But I walked in and said, ‘Oh, I love it!’”
The images are hard to reconcile with the present-day space. Each room is eclectically themed and meticulously arranged, mostly with American antiques, including many Kentucky-made pieces, along with vintage Derby glasses, books, and assorted memorabilia. There’s also a small bar serving coffee, cappuccinos, and if you’d like, bourbon.
That’s where I’m introduced to longtime Bloomfield resident Tom Wigginton, who tends the bar as a part-time job following a four-decade career in banking and farming. “We’re primarily an agricultural community, especially when tobacco was king,” he explains, noting that Bloomfield was once home to two tobacco warehouses that were the “lifeblood of the community.”
The building we’re standing in now was formerly a pool hall and a furniture store. “Then, well, they just boarded the building up,” Wigginton tells me. Without the Bruckheimers, the town of about 900 residents “would have fallen down around our ears,” he says.
That transformation is visible all along the few blocks that comprise downtown Bloomfield. Miss Merrifield’s Tea Parlor is just a few storefronts down. Behind it, through a shaded courtyard, Bruckheimer has reimagined a large potting shed as the Old Pink House; the interior drips with botanicals installed by Kentucky designer Jon Carloftis, and it’s easy to imagine a small group settling in around the artfully set dining table for a luncheon or baby shower.
The Double Dip Soda Fountain sits across the street in what was formerly a church activity center. Visitors can dig into a banana split at the counter and bowl a game on the four-lane, 1930s-era Brunswick bowling alley. The adjoining Ernie’s Tavern still sports the worn wooden floors from when the building served as a roller rink. On one wall in Ernie’s, near a guitar once owned by Johnny Cash and a flight jacket Tom Cruise wore in the original Top Gun, Bruckheimer points out a black-and-white photograph of several relatives, including her grandmother, Alvah Aschbacher, as a young woman. “They were all from Appalachia,” Bruckheimer says. Miss Allie, as everyone called her, moved to Bloomfield in her later years and lived to be 103.
Anna Belle Archer’s, a Victorian-themed boarding house above Rowdy’s Dance Hall & Saloon (a renovated establishment where folks can hear live music most weekends), may be Bruckheimer’s most over-the-top creation. Every inch of the sleeping rooms and common areas is covered in red velvet, patterned wallpaper, portraits, elaborate lighting fixtures, and other hallmarks of the High Victorian era. I notice two tall floor sconces flanking a hallway door, which Bruckheimer says she found in England. “Sometimes I’ll buy something like that when I’m not doing a project they would be suitable for, and then its purpose becomes clear years later,” she says. Across the street, she’s transformed a building that formerly housed a barber shop into the Velvet Room, a 1920s-style speakeasy.
“I’ll just become fascinated by an era or an object or a movie and say, you know, I want to do a room like that,” she says. “It becomes a canvas, in a way.”
Bruckheimer’s approach has earned her more than a collection of renovated businesses. She has served on the board of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and created the Linda and Jerry Bruckheimer Preservation Fund for Kentucky. But it’s the cumulative impact on Bloomfield that’s most visible. Besides Bruckheimer’s properties, several other independently owned businesses have opened in town, including Shortcrust Coffee and Pastry Bar, Froggie’s Bar and Grill, and The Nest clothing boutique.
After a libation in the Velvet Room, we walk down the street to the town’s old Methodist church, built in 1860, which Bruckheimer is renovating into a venue for weddings, performances, and other events. It was also the church that Tom Wiggenton’s wife, Jenny, who helps manage the Bloomfield properties, attended as a child.
“Tom said it right. If you hadn’t come to town, every one of us who is from here could shut our eyes and know exactly what we would be looking at,” Jenny says to Bruckheimer as the three of us sit talking in the church basement. “You don’t know how many people tell me that. What on earth would Bloomfield be? If you hadn’t purchased the church, what would have happened to it?’”
“Somebody would have bought it,” Bruckheimer says. “It’s one thing to be a one-person town, but you really don’t know if the town is successful until you have other people coming in and being successful. That’s the way a city should be.”
For Bruckheimer, that sense of growing community matters far more than any one building or ambitious idea.
“It’s funny,” she says. “We’ve been here more than thirty years, and I feel like we’re just getting started.”
To inquire about booking lodging in Bloomfield or hosting an event, visit nettie-jarvis.com or email [email protected].
Tom Wilmes is a journalist based in central Kentucky who covers bourbon and other spirits, travel, and food. A contributor to Garden & Gun, he has also written for Whisky Advocate, The Local Palate, Southbound, and other publications. A Kentucky Colonel and Certified Executive Bourbon Steward, he has spent years reporting on—and indulging in—the culture he covers, a responsibility he doesn’t take lightly. Follow him on Instagram @americadistilled.