Fence Company in Sans Souci, SC

Anderson Fence Company is a fence company in Sans Souci, SC, working the bungalow streets three miles north of downtown Greenville. The census counted 8,581 people here in 2020, on ground bordered to the west by Berea and to the southwest by Parker, and the housing has almost nothing in common with either of them.

Sans Souci is a suburb rather than a mill village, and the difference shows in every lot line. The name belonged to the house and estate of Benjamin F. Perry, the Unionist who was appointed provisional governor of South Carolina in 1865. The property sold in 1902, opened as the Sans Souci Country Club in 1905, and the name carried on through residential development that ran from 1911 to the Second World War. Nobody was housing a workforce here. Developers were selling lots to buyers, and they sold them deep and narrow with a driveway down one side.

What a bungalow lot needs from a fence

The classic Sans Souci property is a Craftsman bungalow or a small cottage sitting fairly close to the street with a wide front porch, a single width driveway running past the side of the house, and most of the land behind. Fence that lot the way you would fence a modern subdivision back yard and you end up with something that looks wrong from the sidewalk and works badly in use.

What suits it is usually a two part answer. Something low and open at the front, picket or a short aluminum run, which respects the porch and keeps the street frontage looking like the street. Then privacy starting at the front corner of the house and running back, at full height, where it is actually doing a job. The transition between the two happens at the house corner, which is the detail that makes it look intentional rather than improvised.

• A gate across the driveway at the house corner, wide enough for a car if the drive is still used that way
• A separate walk gate on the porch side so the front path is not blocked by a vehicle gate
• Height changing at the house corner rather than mid run, because a fence that steps down in open ground reads as a mistake
• A finished face to the street on the front section, since that is the elevation everyone sees

8,581 peopleLived in Sans Souci at the 2020 census, on a grid platted between 1911 and the Second World War, which is why the lots run deep and narrow rather than square.

The driveway is the only way in

On a narrow lot with the house close to one boundary, the driveway is often the single route to the back yard, and sometimes the only gap is the three feet between the house wall and the fence line. That decides how the job is done before anything else does. Material gets carried rather than driven in, holes get dug by hand where an auger will not pass, and spoil has to go somewhere on a lot with no spare ground.

We measure the pinch point on the quote visit and price against it. It is not a small variable. A hundred and fifty feet of fence on an open lot and the same hundred and fifty feet reached through a thirty six inch gap are different jobs, and pretending they are the same is how a quote becomes a negotiation halfway through.

Detached garages and old outbuildings are the other recurring feature. Plenty of Sans Souci lots still have a small garage or shed at the rear of the drive, and the fence usually ties into it rather than running past it. A tie into an old timber structure needs a post of its own next to the building rather than fasteners into century old framing that may not take the load.

A neighborhood in the middle of changing

Sans Souci has been renovating steadily, and that shows up in the fencing mix. A street can run from a house that has not been touched in forty years to one finished last spring, and both of them want a fence. The first usually wants a repair or a replacement on a line that already exists. The second usually wants something that did not exist before, most often a front yard fence where the lot was open.

Two larger projects are shaping the area. The former textile finishing site nearby, a property of roughly 238 acres, is under redevelopment, and a Swamp Rabbit Trail connector has been planned through the community. Neither changes how a fence is built, but both change what people want from one, and we are seeing more requests for front yard enclosure and for gates that face a public route rather than a neighbor.