discovery at dawn
I’ve been working at Switchyards this week, trying to be out of the house and away from its many distractions, just trying to finish the things I said I was going to finish. It's where I am writing this newsletter.
I’ve been here a few times before, just for meetings, but I’ve spent a whole week here now and wanted to talk about it.
Switchyards does several things well. I don’t know much about their business model except that they’re opening locations across the Southeast at a pretty aggressive clip (about 2 per month). It’s $100/month, month-to-month neighborhood workspace. Great coffee (I’m having Nashville's Crema), fast internet, and attractive, eclectic interiors. All of their spaces are in premium urban residential areas, so the rent can't be cheap. Must be a lot of members.
Nothing about the space is fancy or pretentious, which I love. It feels downright homey. Don’t get me wrong—pretentious can be great on a date, but is that really where you want to work every day?
This is where many members’ clubs go wrong - too fancy. It gets too scene-y, too fast. You can only be the new flex for so long before a newer flex opens around the corner, decked out in the latest.
What stands out to me at Switchyards is the use of enclosure. The location I’m using is in a beautiful old church building, so it's going to be hard to screw this up. In the center of the main room, formerly the nave, is a U-shaped arrangement of sofas with a “wall” behind them made of artificial plants and tall floor lamps with oversized shades.
That little boundary changes everything—it keeps you from making awkward eye contact across the room, and gives you a sense of your own space.
They’ve done this all over: different table heights, bookshelves as screens, big table lamps (both lighting and a physical screen), library-style partition row desks, individual lounge chairs, and quiet rooms tucked away when you need to lock in.
The design is boutique hotel-meets-eclectic vintage. From an interior design standpoint, it’s nothing revolutionary—but it’s well executed. I believe they had a few under their belt before opening this location, and you can tell. Everything is very systematized.
I hear they have a massive warehouse in Atlanta full of decor and furniture that they draw from for new locations. Seems like a fun and booming biz, highly reccomend if there is a location in your area.
This morning, my son woke up at 5 am, as he has unfortunately been doing his whole life. Instead of another round of Hungry Hungry Hippos (Ninja Turtles edition), we drove over to Neuhoff in Germantown, on the banks of the Cumberland River, to greet the dawn.
It’s been my favorite building in Nashville for a long time—an old, mostly vacant meatpacking facility with wild patina and vegetation. When it sold, I was worried. I didn’t want them to ruin it. But I hadn’t seen it since the renovation was finished.
Pleasantly surprised: they nailed it.
It’s an enormous property that you can wander through, and they were respectful to the original structure. All the weathered concrete and character remain. The new insertions are clean glass boxes tucked between the columns—housing food, retail, and office space.
via S9 Architecture's Website
I like what they did with the landscaping. Rugged concrete and metal planters built up with huge dirt mounds covered in wild native plantings that give the place a sense of terrain and enclosure. They feel very organic, like hillsides.
The whole place has this tropical brutalism quality that reminded me a bit of Diplo’s concrete Jamaican compound—or more than that, Ricardo Bofill’s La Fabrica, perhaps my favorite building of all time.
And it got me thinking again about something I often return to as a design test:
Would a kid enjoy playing hide and seek here?
Would they feel a sense of exploration and wonder? Would they want to run around the corners and into new spaces that reveal themselves slowly, instead of all open, all bright, all at once?
That might be the simplest definition of good design I know: it invites discovery.
