Hotelier: Restoration over renovation

What has surprised you most about the realities of running a hotel, and how has it changed the way you think about hospitality?

Tyler: All the little details. With our commercial properties, we build them out and then hand them over to a tenant who handles their own final finishes, customer experience and operations. But with the hotel…there's no tenant to hand it off to; the experience is ours to get right, down to the smallest touch.

And getting those details right is everything, because that's exactly where hospitality lives. A guest may never be able to tell you why a stay felt special, but they feel it. It’s a hundred tiny decisions they feel but never consciously notice, and together they’re the difference between a place people pass through and a place people fall in love with. In commercial real estate, “good enough” often is. In hospitality, the details are the product. That's completely changed how I think about this business.

Lynna: For me, it was learning that design does not end at install. In residential and commercial work, you hand over the space and the client lives in it. In a hotel, the design gets stress tested by hundreds of strangers who did not read the concept deck. You find out very quickly which choices were beautiful and which choices were beautiful and durable. It has made me a better designer. I now think about every material and every layout decision through the lens of the housekeeper, the bartender and the guest arriving at midnight, not just the photograph.

How did you decide what to preserve, what to reinterpret and where to compromise?

Lynna: Our framing from the beginning was restoration, not renovation. This building had something to say before we ever touched it, and the job was mostly listening. The site carries nearly two hundred years of history, from the original home to the 1950s motor court era, so we had two authentic layers to honor rather than one. 

The test we applied was simple: preserve what carries the story, reinterpret what carries the feeling and compromise only on what guests never see. The bones of the Main House, the rhythm of the motor court buildings, the pool as the social heart of the property—those were non-negotiable. The pool area in particular is a deliberate tribute to the original hotel pool, down to the fringed umbrellas. Where we compromised was behind the walls. New plumbing, new electrical, modern systems. The guest should feel history without ever having to endure it.

Tyler: Honestly, we let the buildings tell us what they wanted to be. When you’re standing inside something that’s been here since 1824, you feel a responsibility to it. We treated [the Main House] like a museum piece and built everything else around celebrating it, rather than trying to compete with it. The 1950s pool and the old motel were a different story. They had good bones and personality, but gave us room to have some fun, and that’s where the “Palm Springs meets Southern hospitality” feeling came from.

The hard calls were always the in-between ones. History is what people should feel, but it’s not an excuse for a bad guest experience. Nobody’s ever going to have a magical stay because we kept an original, miserable bathroom. So we fought to protect the things that give this place its soul, and we modernized everything a guest just expects to work: the plumbing, the HVAC, the wifi. The goal was for it to feel like it’s always been here, while working like it was built yesterday.

How did you think about Salt Ranch's impact on the community, and the broader role hotels play in supporting their neighborhoods?

Lynna: From a design standpoint, honoring the property’s history is itself a form of community respect we exercised from the start. This site has been part of East Nashville’s story for two centuries. We could have scraped it and built something taller and denser, and the numbers might have argued for it. Instead, we kept a landmark that longtime residents actually recognize. That continuity matters.

Tyler: I’m a Nashville native, and our team has invested heavily in East and North Nashville for years. We feel it’s our duty to make sure these communities stay intact while we re-imagine longstanding properties. A hotel can either overshadow a neighborhood or anchor it, and we built Salt Ranch to anchor ours. We actually encourage our neighbors to treat Salt Ranch as their “clubhouse.” The Swim Club is a membership and a day pass for locals, and the Barroom is a neighborhood bar first and a hotel bar second. If the only people who ever use this place are out-of-town guests, we’ve failed.

Being woven into the fabric of the community is everything to me; it’s what I’ve built my entire business on. So much of what makes a neighborhood special comes from its small businesses, the little cultural phenomena you can’t manufacture and once those are gone, they’re gone. I feel a real responsibility to preserve and celebrate that.