In 2018, four women came together with a mission and a message — that all the disparate design communities could come together to change the discourse of what a new and improving Nashville could be. To open the door for new voices to be heard in how we grow as a city and as a community.
And so Fuller Hanan, then a project manager with Pfeffer Torode Architecture, Kate O’Neil, then an architect and designer with Hastings Architecture, Lindsay DeCarlo, also then with Hastings, and Julia Dyer, then a merchandiser with VF Workwear, pulled together the first Nashville Design Week. It was a multidisciplinary series of workshops, panels, discussions and site visits meant to give everyone — designers, architects, artists, makers and the public — a voice in the sometimes difficult discussion around Nashville’s growth, and how current design will affect what we leave behind.
“This is the perfect moment to take pause and think, ‘OK, how can we create artist housing with all of this new construction? How can we make sure that all of the creatives that have been able to afford and live and work and grow small businesses here still have the opportunity to do that 10 years from now?”said DeCarlo at the time. “And it’s not too late. We are at a moment where we can make change in that arena, and that’s why we’re so excited to be doing this now.”
Those four women felt the pressure to not only have the event live up to the vision, but to make the right choices on programming — and be open to input about how to improve what could be a defining moment in Nashville design.
“These conversations have been happening, it’s just the hope is that it’ll be taken to a whole different level during design week, where people just get together that maybe wouldn’t normally be in a room together, in more of a relaxed atmosphere where you feel comfortable having conversations about tough topics,” Dyer said in 2018. “There’s only room for growth. There’s no limit to what we can be, while keeping our identity.”
The response to the premiere Design Week was overwhelmingly positive. Sponsors signed on, dozens of people were organized into volunteers and their initial call for events got triple their best-case scenario estimate, with nearly 90 submissions.
“I think we all kind of thought we’d have to convince people that there was a need for it,” DeCarlo said back then. “And the design community has just welcomed us with open arms.”
In 2025, the mission of what those founders intended, and the embrace from the design community, is alive and growing.
Nathan Hutcheson, a creative professional in marketing and design, moved to Nashville in 2022. In 2023 he volunteered for NDW for the first time. This year he served as partnership chair, raising money and securing sponsorships.
“We want the community to come together,” he said. “All of our events are submitted by people in the community. It isn’t us deciding what we’re going to do or what we’re going to talk about. This is a community organization. We might be leading it behind the scenes, but we want this to be what Nashville’s design community is about.”
As communications chair for Nashville Design Week this year, Nichols led editorial, marketing, and communications strategy in an effort to amplify the creative voices shaping the city.
With a deep passion for architecture, hospitality and art, Nichols, a Jackson, Miss., native, believes in the power of design to reflect identity and community. And the power of NDW to keep pushing that forward, welcoming all to the conversation.
“It think a lot of times very important people get left out of the conversation, and I think our events actually create a space where these two different groups of people — people who are in the know, who can make big decisions, are in the room with people who may not have that much influence, but still have so much to bring as far as ideas,” Nichols said.
“Our events create the opportunity for two worlds to collide and figure out how they can make progress within the city. Building that community. And I think, especially right now in our world, we’re so divided and we need to have more moments where we feel more unified. And I think design, in so many ways, brings us all together.”
Also fairly new to Nashville, Haley Beckham-Shetty is the founder and lead designer of Bex Interiors, and serves as the operations chair for NDW, championing collaboration and connection across the city’s design community.
“From the get go, our mission has been about putting designers in Nashville on the map. Giving them a platform,” Beckham-Shetty said. “And the reality is we are in year eight, and the designers are on the map. We have very talented design firms, and Nashville has a pretty great name in the design community overall. So I’m hoping we can reshape our mission to really focus on how we get these designers and artisans and all of these people to cross pollinate and collaborate. I want our future to showcase what happens when Nashville designers get together.”
