Taylor Place in Germantown, Nashville

Taylor Place is 14 acres of former industrial land between Germantown and Salemtown, master-planned by Smith Gee Studio since 2011. Three buildings carry this page. 602 Taylor Street is new construction — two stories, 18,700 square feet, finished in 2020, with Smith Gee’s own office upstairs; they built their headquarters on the block they were redrawing. The Werthan Warehouse is the keeper — a 1950s bag-printing warehouse converted to 66,000 square feet of office. And the Hamilton and Hume House are the apartments: 85 and 245 units with a shared garage, completed October 2022.

A Campus, Not a Building

The Flats at Taylor Place — 282 units fronting Fifth Avenue — came first, back in 2014. Hodgson Douglas did the landscape across the campus. R.C. Mathews built it. META Real Estate Partners developed the three newer buildings; SWH Residential developed the Flats.

The Bags

The industry came long before the apartments. The Tennessee Manufacturing Company had cotton mills running here by 1871 — the largest in the area — and in 1928 the Werthan Bag Company took over the textile operations. Cotton became bags on this ground for most of a century: burlap sacks, sandbags through the Second World War, pet-food packaging near the end. Industrial use didn’t stop until 1998. The 1871 mill buildings themselves became the Werthan Lofts years ago — they sit next door, related by name, not part of Taylor Place. People run the two together — I’ve done it myself. The distinction matters, because the awards below belong to specific buildings.

The warehouse Smith Gee saved is a 100,000-square-foot building — about 60,000 square feet of it under a bow-truss roof, 40,000 on a steel frame, and the Werthan print shop ran in the steel-frame end. The conversion put a two-story atrium lobby in it and kept artifacts from the factory years, reworked as sculptural and furniture pieces. When the AIA Tennessee jury gave it an Award of Merit for restoration and renovation, they singled out the historic materials repurposed along the streetscape.

Six Awards, Three Buildings

I count six awards on this campus, and they split cleanly. 602 Taylor Street: an AIA Middle Tennessee Merit Award and a Metro Historical Commission Preservation Award — in the infill category, because it’s new work that behaves. The Werthan Warehouse: an AIA Middle Tennessee Merit Award, a Metro preservation award in the commercial category, and that AIA Tennessee Award of Merit. The Hamilton and Hume House: the Best in American Living finalist spot, 2024, in a national field. The buildings and Smith Gee Studio won every one of them.

One correction, for the record: this page once listed a ULI Nashville Excellence in Development award here. That award belongs to the Tennessee State Museum. It’s gone from this page, and it won’t be back.