Report: Swift and Kelce face neighbor backlash over Ohio mansion plans

Published: 10:00 EDT, 10 October 2026 | Updated: 10:00 EDT, 10 October 2026

Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce have been blasted as ‘absentee’ owners by a furious neighbor trying to block them from erecting a six-foot fence and planting scores of towering trees around their $5.35 million Ohio mansion, the Daily Mail can reveal.

The A-List newlyweds are currently embroiled in an extraordinary showdown with locals in a quaint Lake Erie village as they seek to create a private oasis for their newly purchased luxury estate.

But longtime residents have pulled out all the stops to thwart the plans in recent weeks – raising everything from deer potentially being impaled on the fence’s spiked railings to drone fears and the threat of raw sewage backing up into the house next door.

At a planning board meeting last month in the village of Bratenahl, just outside Cleveland, the black aluminum fence was unanimously approved after more than an hour of objections from the people living on either side of the famous couple, newly-released records obtained by the Daily Mail show.

Since then, though, the row has only continued to escalate – proving the singer and Kansas City Chief’s war with locals is far from over.

A furious Katherine Bolton, who has lived next door for the past 35 years, told Bratenahl’s Architectural Review Board during last month’s meeting that news of her new neighbors had been a ‘tremendous blow’ to ‘the peace and quiet in Bratenahl.’

‘There’s a new owner, who is an absentee owner, who is not going to be here,’ she said, according to a recently published record of the hearing.

Remarkably, not once in the 72-page transcript of the showdown does anyone say the names of the power couple.

But at a hearing on Tuesday night, Bolton finally said out loud what the whole village had been dancing around, telling the board the house next door had been ‘recently purchased by Travis Kelce.’

The 21,000-square-foot house has eight bedrooms, 11 bathrooms and a two-bedroom guest cottage. Built in 1895, it features a ballroom that has been converted into a game room and home theater.

Aerial photographs reveal the inside of the sprawling estate for the first time since Kelce purchased it, including its manicured lawns, stunning lake view, winding driveway and cottage build from the same red brick as the mansion.

During the meeting, Bolton said that she was locked in talks with the couple’s attorney over a century-old clay sewer pipe that the mansion shares with her home.

She said she had been quoted a staggering $75,000 to line the pipe against tree roots after learning Kelce and Swift wanted to plant scores of trees around their estate.

‘Planting 50 evergreen trees just ten feet from a 100-year-old clay sewer line is virtually guaranteed to cause severe root intrusion, pipe structural failure and catastrophic sewage backups,’ Bolton told the meeting, citing research she conducted using artificial intelligence.

She went on to suggest, too, that the new owners would not be around long enough to care.

‘This applicant may decide to sell her house next year, maybe move on and buy another house,’ Bolton said, according to the transcript.

‘What am I going to do when I have 50 evergreen trees on my sewer line, and they’re gone? And I’m still living here in Bratenahl.’

The most striking objections came from Chuck Bauernschmidt, who has lived two doors down for 39 years.

He laid into the new owners over the state of the grounds, brandishing photographs of what he called ‘the total clear cutting of the shrubbery and everything else.’

‘It’s now ridiculous,’ he said, according to the transcript. ‘All the trees are gone.’

Bauernschmidt also warned the fence’s spear-topped design was a danger to wildlife, telling the board that deer have been known to get caught on the points.

Asked whether that was true, village official Mary Ranney replied: ‘Occasionally.’

Bolton’s husband, Bill, who is a former president of Bratenahl village council, also chimed in – noting that a fence would not keep out paparazzi.

Despite accepting that ‘the applicant has higher security needs than many people,’ he scoffed that ‘either five or six feet’ in fencing would not ‘slow down a motivated able-bodied young person’ from potentially peeking in.

‘I think that the greater security threat for the applicant is from drones and the water,’ he said, urging the village to start planning for them now.

‘Are they going to be able to shoot them down?’ he added. ‘Do they have the right to shoot them down? I don’t know anything about that, but I do know that all over the world the paparazzi is pretty aggressive.’

At Tuesday’s hearing, the board approved the landscaping at the front of Kelce and Swift’s estate but only on the condition that the trees on the south side are positioned with enough room to mature properly.

It held off entirely on approving the planting of a wall of saplings along the shoreline, ruling those trees would stand too tall even if they were pruned.

Instead, the famous couple must now come back a third time with a fresh plan.

Pictures taken at the estate show that trees have already been ripped out and yard work is under way, with turf lifted and bare mud underneath.

A ‘no trespassing’ sign has also been posted at the front of the property.

Swift and Kelce’s side, meanwhile, hit back at the board, insisting they had bent over backwards to keep the peace amid the ongoing saga.

Their team of planners admitted to the board that they originally wanted an eight-foot fence to snake 1,190 feet around the lakefront estate, before being talked down.

‘The house was one of the largest sales in Cuyahoga County, so the homeowner is looking for privacy and security,’ said Jacob Kutz of Tiny Construction, who is running the project.

The six-foot fence that was finally approved will replace an existing five-foot one – and has been shifted two feet further inside the boundary. Crucially for the neighbors, it stops short of Lake Erie.

Property manager Patrick Hyland told the board at last month’s hearing that the owner had agreed neighbors could keep cutting across the back gardens with permission ‘after what happened… over the weekend.’

That seems to be a reference to prior reports that a neighbor who got too close to the house had been met by a recorded voice warning them off the property.

Hyland told the meeting, too, that his clients had paid $7,500 of their own money to replace a broken section of the shared sewer and had the whole line jetted and cleaned two weeks earlier, ‘without asking for any help, just to show that we’re good neighbors.’

Kutz said Kelce and Swift’s side moved the fence two feet inside the property’s own boundary and added two gates so Bolton still has access to the sewer; dropped the plan to run it down to the water; and cut back trees on the Boltons’ and the Stephensons’ land at their own cost.

A survey showed they could have claimed four extra feet on the far side, according to Kutz.

Meanwhile, a gate was added for Bauernschmidt after he complained he felt ‘closed off.’

‘We went ahead and did that for Chuck,’ Kutz said.

On the sewer issue, Kutz turned the accusation around, telling the board it was Bolton who had ‘planted some Arborvitaes on the sewer line, basically directly on it,’ far closer than anything the couple are proposing.

As for the stripped grounds, Kutz produced his own photographs of what he said the estate had looked like before.

‘This is not an open field,’ he told the board, describing heavy overgrowth that ‘just hasn’t been maintained.’

Despite the objections, not every neighbor was against the famous couple.

Victoria Broer, who chaired the village’s planning commission for almost 20 years, told the board she was relieved the fence stopped where it did, noting: ‘I do appreciate that the fence is not going all the way to the lake, because that would be in my view.’

Property records show the mansion was bought by an LLC linked to Kelce in March. It had been incorporated in Ohio on February 26 of this year and was used to buy the property seven days later.

The Daily Mail reached out to Swift and Kelce for comment.