There are pictures of me going back to the 1960s with a cup of coffee in my hand, which means coffee and I have been acquainted longer than most of you have been alive. You’d think that after sixty years I’d know something about it, but my expertise begins and ends with “drink it.”

So naturally, when it was time to sit down with Campbell Speas, we met at Rembrandt’s Coffee House. Cam recently moved to Chattanooga for her first job out of college and arrived with an organized, typed list of the places she’s already grown fond of.

I did not bring a list like Cam did. however, I did bring an iced coffee, several unrelated stories, and a complaint about gray walls across my apartment complex.

Somewhere between our conversation about Sunset Rock, charcoal drawings, and Chattanooga’s devotion to battleship-colored apartments, we discovered that two people who arrived here at very different points in life can still notice many of the same things about this beautiful city.

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And now it’s time to go WAAAAAAAAAAAAY back… to 2024. That’s when I moved to Chattanooga from Carbondale, IL, located at the southern tip of the state. I lived in C’dale for four years, but for undisclosed reasons, moved back to Tennessee. From 1998 to 2020, I lived in Nashville, but didn’t move back there because, in 22 years, it grew from a comfortable mid-sized city into a bulging, traffic-jammed metropolis… with guitars, lots of guitars.

As the great baseball player Yogi Berra once quipped, “It was like déjà vu all over again.” The first time I visited Chattanooga was in the late ’90s, and the mountains and caves charmed me. But when I moved here in 2024, something else captured my attention. When I drove through residential neighborhoods with mid-century modern homes mixed with 100-year-old workers’ bungalows, I felt that I’d been there before!

But I had not visited the South until the 1970s.

It was as if I had someone else’s memories of the place, and they were very pleasant! The lawns, trees, old and new homes, street lamps, and sidewalks looked familiar and beautiful!

I’ve been to Europe, Canada, and Mexico, lived in at least six states and a dozen cities, but Chattanooga sticks out as the most scenic. Everywhere I go in this city, there is something beautiful to see, whether it be the homes, mountains, farms, or forests. Everywhere there is beautiful scenery, even in the not-so-expensive areas of the city.

And downtown?

It looks much bigger than it should, considering the Scenic City’s population is less than 200,000, and the metro area is a little more than half a million. And where I live in the Mountain Creek area, it’s a ten-minute drive to the top of Signal Mountain to the north, and a ten-minute drive to downtown heading south. I live in the middle of a forest, with Aldi a five-minute walk away and Walmart another five minutes.

Apartment rents are low, and the cost of living is below the national average.

Talk about having everything!

Yup, I think I’ll stay here for a while.

Originally from Winston-Salem, Campbell “Cam” Speas landed in Chattanooga for her first job out of college in interior architecture. She’d never heard of the city. Now she’s got a list of essentials, from sunset views on Lookout Mountain to live music at Cherry Street Tavern.

We met at Rembrandt’s Coffee House to compare notes on our adopted hometown, talk charcoal landscapes and what an interior architect actually does, and discover that a Boomer and a Gen Z can agree on quite a bit. Particularly when neither one wants to live inside a battleship-gray apartment.

I always assumed architects concerned themselves with buildings while interior decorators argued over throw pillows. Cam explained that interior architecture occupies the space between them: structure, building codes, accessibility, and how a room actually works for the people inside it.

This means somebody deliberately decided that every room in my apartment should be battleship gray.

That decision was not an accident, which deeply concerns me.

Outside, Chattanooga can’t seem to settle on a single view. There are mountains, forests, old workers’ bungalows, mid-century homes, and a river cutting straight through downtown. Then you walk indoors and suddenly everything looks like the color printer ran out of ink.

Gray is supposed to be safe and neutral. But use enough of it and “neutral” becomes a very noticeable decision. Cam called it sterile, which may be the most accurate diagnosis my apartment has received.

I had never given paint much thought beyond whether it covered the wall. Apparently, color can change whether a room feels welcoming, lived-in, or like you’re waiting for someone to call your name at the dentist.

A city with this much character outside deserves rooms that haven’t been frightened out of having any. I guess that’s what you get when you don’t build ‘em yourself.

WELL I’LL BE DAMNED.