Five Juliet balconies line the third-floor condo at 227 Second Avenue North, their French doors allowing sunlight to wash over its honey-colored beech floors.
Emily Desimone
This is significant not only because it floods this chic, Parisian-style space with light, but also because a row of Juliet balconies is not a typical design feature of a commercial building built in 1911.
Adjacent to the 21c Museum Hotel, this four-story brick building features Italianate influences, a flat roof, and an overhanging cornice with giant supporting brackets. Originally built formanufacturing, like many of the surrounding buildings, it sits flush with the street, its lobby doorway opening onto the sidewalk.
When Jennifer Willoughby began converting the building into three single-level lofts, she knew its façade wouldn’t allow for any design flexibility due to the rules governing its location in the Second Avenue Historic Preservation District. So, while she left the windows facing the street unchanged, she trained her focus to the side alley that was legally open to transformation.
As a corner building, it originally featured windows along its alley side; these granted a view of theNashville Public Square Park. Willoughby, a Frenchwoman, parlayed those windows into the French doors that are emblematic of Parisian architecture to grant a more expansive view.
“It just changes the dynamic of the condo,” she says.
Willoughby also added four garages to the alley: One for each condo and two for the penthouse, where Willoughby and her husband live with their bobcat kitten, Coco (named after fellow Frenchwoman Coco Chanel). Thanks to each garage’s 18-foot ceiling, cars can be double stacked for storage.
Emily Desimone
A brass-trimmed elevator from the 1940s, accented by Art Deco vents, whisks residents directly into each condominium. Only the third-floor unit remains unoccupied, its plush interior designed by Natalie Hager Interiors to tempt anyone who loves the good life.
The 2,852-square-foot condo is steeped in luxury.
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Emily Desimone
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The kitchen is slathered in Carrara marble from the walls to the counters to the12-foot-long island. There is a Viking Commercial gas cooktop and a 72-inch-wide, side-by-side refrigerator-freezer from the Viking Professional refrigeration line. This kitchen was tailor-made for entertaining.
The living room is illuminated by a modern light fixture that has become cultural shorthand for chic lighting in the Instagram age: The Meurice Rectangular Chandelier by Jonathan Adler. The beech floors that run throughout are original.
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Emily Desimone
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As with the other rooms, the three bedrooms feature original exposed brick walls. There are three-and-a-half bathrooms, including a master bath with an Italian shower and a soaking tub. A 20-by-6-foot walk-in closet attaches to the master bedroom.
“You can definitely store some clothes here,” Willoughby says in a clear understatement.
One of Willoughby’s favorite features is the humble fire escape that looks onto the Metropolitan Courthouse, a historic Art Deco gem from1937. Here, one feels unified with the tapestry of historic details that define the neighborhood: A gargoyle here, a strip of dentil molding there, and soon it all adds up to an undeniable sense of place.