I’ve lived in 12South for a bazillion years. My grandparents called the neighborhood home when I was growing up, and I bought my little home here when it was still crusty and working class. When I moved here the neighborhood was filled with older people, and they all kept their yards flawless and their houses—even if they were painted orange—were fabulous.

I was surrounded by such characters—so was right in my element—and I loved them. Every Sunday they were all away at church until 3 o’clock, and when they baked, you could smell it from a mile away. One woman, Ms. Hill, lived in this little brick house. There was a gorgeous hydrangea bush outside, and she was always in there baking a pie. I loved her.​

​After she passed away, somebody in her family held onto her house as rental property. Then, this classic house fell into my lap, thanks to my realtor friend who called me about it and said, “Can you believe that house in your neighborhood just sold?” I was like, “No! That’s Ms. Hill’s house!”

When that person’s funding fell through, you better believe I was standing next in line for this house, which was probably built in 1937 or 1938. The basement is the most pristine thing you’ve ever seen. The foundation is solid, and the floors are all level. It’s on a corner, and it’s cute as hell.
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I just couldn’t resist.

​I’m trying to protect my street from the bulldozers. I’m doing a renovation and expansion to my house, and I found out this week that some of my favorite neighbors are also going to do a second story addition on their house. I am thrilled to be given the opportunity to preserve and update this house and to help protect 12South’s character.

Here’s what we have planned for this house:

1) I’m going to put a second floor on the house, not unlike what I did nearby with the Lawrence house.

2) I want to make a section of the exterior super tall and change the pitch so it’s steeper like what Bynum Design normally does.

3) I’m also going to see if I can connect those porches so that there’s a wraparound. I want to put a really cute dormer here on the roof.

4) On the backside I’m going to build back and either extend a master suite around a courtyard—like we did on Lawrence—and connect it to a garage, or have a detached garage and a courtyard space between the house and the garage and hopefully put in a swimming pool.

5) Ms. Hill had a huge hydrangea bush, but some stupid kids who lived in her house for awhile just mowed it down. I’m going to try to resurrect it if I can find the roots. The house itself is almost hidden behind this magnificent magnolia tree (that Ms. Hill planted for all I know) so I’m going to have the tree trimmed.
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6) Plus, much, much more.

Important side note (which you will not find in ordinary MLS listings): A neighbor on a corner adjacent to this house is one of my favorite people in the world. He’s an old man who has been there forever. He’s just the coolest man—so, so awesome. Whoever ends up living here will be beyond lucky to have a neighbor like him.
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I’m so excited to get my hands on this home. I'm gonna do right by Ms. Hill. Stay tuned.

When the people behind Twelve Twelve, Nashville's new glass-encased luxury residential high-rise, asked Bynum Design and D.Luxe Home to stage one of their models, we didn't hesitate.

We were one of five local interior design teams picked to style a space in this statuesque 23-story building, made up of 286 units of posh living, including seven penthouses and two guest suites---all punctuated by breathtaking views. Our unit was a canvas we were beyond excited to paint---literally and figuratively. We were able to choose flooring and wall coverings, window coverings, paint colors and many fixtures, and to furnish it exactly the way we wanted. We were even kindly allowed to do some additional construction on the unit to better suit our vision.​

​Our strategy was to decorate our unit exactly as we would if we were going to move into it ourselves. We also aimed to mirror the sexy sophistication and detail of this magnificent building's exterior in its interior. And finally, while the temptation in a space with a view as sweeping as this one is to make it "all about the view," we understood that in reality people aren't going to be spending all of their time draped against the glass, gawking at the Nashville skyline. Instead, it was most important that the space be livable and comfortable and that the view serve as a backdrop instead of the focal point. So we placed a lot of furniture against the window wall and chose to make the focal points of the room be inward rather than outward.

​While we put the finishing touches on our unit to get it photo-ready, we thought we'd share our inspiration boards with you.

​Stay tuned and check back to the blog soon for the full reveal of our Twelve Twelve dwelling, plenty of details about the construction and design process and sources for some of our fabulous furniture and accessories. (Hint: You can find most of them at D.Luxe Home.)

This is awkward for me to talk about. I’m a developer, after all, and in the midst of the biggest building boom of our city’s time. So addressing some of the criticism recently lobbed at Nashville—specifically how we’re hemorrhaging character faster than developers can build crappy houses out of crappier materials—is not exactly within my realm of comfort. Except that the subject means absolutely everything to me.
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When The New York Times wrote in December that “gentrification is threatening Nashville’s soul,” I agreed with them. Point by point, here is my response to Steve Haruch’s NYT piece, which was hard to hear for many in Music City, but, in my opinion, spot-on.

Nashville is rapidly losing its identity, falling into step with the homogenization of America. Some days it seems that everybody is in a mad rush to destroy our city as fast as they can because they don’t know when our day in the sun will end. It’s all, ‘How fast can I do this?' And ‘How much can I sell it for?’ This is what started to happened before the recession, and now everybody and their brother have jumped back on the bandwagon, thinking they can flip a house because they watched it on HGTV. Now everyone’s doing it again. It’s driving up costs, and it’s driving up demand for lots, and it’s completely confusing the architecture of the neighborhoods. We’ve got so many different thought processes side by side; on one street you might have 10 different thoughts—and maybe only one or two of them are even good. It’s disruptive. For as many new homes as we’re putting up, I don’t see a new style of architecture evolving. I just see greed on everyone’s behalf.

Neighborhoods are being scraped, and we’re replacing them with new houses made of new and questionable materials. A lot of these materials and technologies that are being developed—we don’t know what they’re going to look like a few years down the road. Remember in the ’80s, there was a trend to use Dryvit—an “outsulation” finish that looks like stucco? Suddenly Mediterranean houses all over town popped up clad in this new-fangled material. But then everyone discovered that because Dryvit is essentially made of something like Styrofoam, it looks great only temporarily—until a golf ball hits it or a weedeater knocks into it. It dents, and you can never fix it. And it has something in it that bugs love, but no one knew that when Dryvit became a thing. The same thing could very well be happening in Nashville now. We don’t know how these houses are going to look in 70 or 80 years. We know what the stuff looked like that they got rid of. And that was our identity. I would be scared to death to live on the third floor of one of these new tall and skinny houses in a high wind or during a tornado. I wouldn’t be in the house. I’d be out driving, trying to outrun it.
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I’m spending a lot of time in this post talking about how things look, but I don’t want to miss the point that as we’re building all of these new houses, we’re inevitably pushing out people who are older or who are low income and can’t afford rising property taxes—people who may have things to contribute to the greater good. These people are part of what made Nashville a unique place to live in the first place. Now they are having to go somewhere else to live, and now we are not unique. Sometimes Nashville looks and feels just like everywhere else. It’s frustrating to go to Atlanta and see how old neighborhoods—and neighbors—are being wiped out. I think it’s kind of a tragedy. In Atlanta and Nashville, we’re losing some of our spirit in the process.

So many of the new tall, narrow houses being built in Nashville look as terrible as they do because they’re built too high off the ground. This is a huge pet peeve of mine, as I think it’s important to keep houses in proportion with their surroundings. In the old days, houses were made to be close to the ground. Now we have codes that prevent you from doing that because stacking them up higher prevents termites, as the wood’s not in contact with the ground. Developers often have very small footprints to build on and they want to fulfill the hunger for significant square footage, so they have no place to go but up because they’re just trying to create space. Unfortunately, square footage has been driving the cost of houses forever. When banks appraise houses they primarily do it based on square footage, so everybody, in their greed, just wants to build the biggest thing they can.
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It doesn’t have to be this way, though—even if a lot is tiny. For instance, anytime Bynum Design has built a home on a hill, we try to scale that down and somehow have our plans follow the landscape—adding steps inside the house—so that it’s not, say, short at the back and a bazillion blocks high in the front. I also think that rather than paying $400,000 for a tiny lot or rather than tearing down a worthwhile house that seems too small at first glance, developers really would do ourselves a far greater service in the long run if we bought up some of the old houses and remodeled them or updated them with roomy additions. Otherwise, it will become true that you can’t have a unique experience in Nashville anymore. As a designer, that’s really disappointing to me; I want us to think bigger than we are so we don’t regret what we’ve become once the spotlight drifts away from us to fall on some other new “it” city.

You can see really obvious examples of what Steve Haruch is talking about if you drive around. Since new houses are going up next door to old ones, plenty of builders are halfheartedly nodding to the prevailing architecture with these kind of "grotesque" details. But they’re not thinking through what they’re doing, and they’re not doing it right. They’re just making the houses bigger and then slapping on a few details that are made up, that don’t belong. At Bynum Design, we aim every single day to massage these kinds of historical details into our designs. We don’t just apply them like they’re buttons or pockets—an afterthought once we’ve achieved some sky-high square footage number. We really work it from a design standpoint, and I think—I hope—that’s the difference.

Maybe it’s easy for me to talk, since I’m one of the lucky ones. Because we can build and design our houses, we don’t have to pay a builder fee or a design fee, so we can spend more money on the quality of our homes and still sell them for the same and make the same amount of money but make them better. I still maintain, though, that all Nashville developers have a huge opportunity—even a responsibility—to build better houses in this city they call home. They can use better materials. They can pay more for labor. They can take more time with a project. It may increase the cost, but it’s worth it. I want to still be doing this 10 years from now, when the economy isn’t as swell and the houses I’ve built here can really stand as a testament to my craftsmanship and to the ability of Nashville to weather growth beautifully.
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I remember Nashville’s last big building boom—maybe it was in the late ’80s or early ’90s—and there were cranes as far as the eye could see. It was an exciting time. It is now, too, but I’m jaded now. I’m older, and sometimes I find myself driving down a street I used to love and feeling depressed about the way it’s changed. But other times all this “progress” really does leave me pleasantly surprised. The other day I drove up to Division Street from down around Broadway; it was a gorgeous day, and I got up to where they just tore down that fabulous old house on the right, and the new view that unfolded in front of me was unbelievable. I was like, “Where am I?” You could see the Pinnacle Building in the distance and all the new apartments along Demonbreun, and it was magical. It felt like home.