Starting medical school in Nashville, biomedical science degree in hand, Cassandra Locante was living a dream. Unfortunately, it wasn’t hers.
“I did a year,” Locante says, looking back at a health care career that wasn’t. “Finally I was, like, ‘I can’t live this lie anymore.’“
Even as an undergrad, a nagging, natural interest kept drawing her toward something else.
“My favorite part of college, the whole four years, was every year I would move apartments,” she remembers. “People would say, ‘You’re insane. Why do you move every year?’ Because I could redecorate. That should have been a big clue to me and to everyone around me that I was not gonna be a doctor.”
Locante, decidedly, was not gonna be a doctor. Over a years-long crash course of learning by doing, she became an in-demand interior designer, an independent entrepreneur and the Nashville Design Collective’s 2024 Rising Star. But without an unofficial first job in Germantown, her career might’ve come together differently.
WERTHAN MILLS TO WINDSOR TOWER
Locante’s parents recognized their daughter’s creative spark, and when she left medical school, they decided to make a fresh investment in her future. They’d purchased a condo in Germantown’s Werthan Lofts, and they invited her to reimagine it, top to bottom.
“I was probably out of my depth,” Locante remembers, “but that’s kind of how I learn best — under pressure.”
She completely overhauled the unit, learning the trade brick by exposed brick. And when the Werthan renovation wrapped and neighbors saw the results, organic, ongoing opportunities opened up.
“I just started getting all these jobs at Werthan,” Locante says, nodding back to an early win: a fun redesign for the cool couple two doors down.
That same couple, now on-the-move retirees with energetic grandkids, recently hired Locante to manage their third project together: a three-bed, three-bath apartment in Nashville’s Windsor Tower.
After Werthan, she’d helped them build a Florida beach house from the ground up. For this one, the homeowners were looking to create more of a pied-à-terre vibe — something stylish that would make Nashville visits easy while comfortably hosting the grandkids.
Most of the couple’s design requests were practical: They needed tons of storage. Materials and accommodations had to keep kid-friendliness in the foreground (extra durability, no sharp corners). After years in the Navy, the proud granddad liked to keep things fastidiously clean, so surfaces had to hold up to a good scrub and polish.
Beyond that, Locante had free creative rein.
“I wanted to respect the Mid-Centuryness of the building,” she says of the historic Nashville high-rise, which was completed in 1967. “And it just kind of evolved from there.”
MID-CENTURY IN MOTION
That Mid-Century inspiration comes through in the finished living room, a cozy space that evokes a modernist conversation pit, inspired by the cover of Studio Shamshiri’s coffee table book and
its soft, semi-circular sofa.
Floor-to-ceiling walnut paneling covers many of the Windsor walls, from the living room into the dining room and beyond. The wood adds warmth, texture and retro energy, and it hides a bunch of practical pluses.
“It opens,” Locante says. “Everything in the wall opens up to storage. So we lost a little bit of square footage, but when you’re talking about condo living…”
The paneling also stands up to a heavy scrubbing, which works well for the home’s prodigious in-house polisher.
All that dark wood does take up a lot of visual space, which presented a balance challenge that Locante conquered by pulling back and editing in elegant ways.
In the kitchen, tiles are bright and light, lines are clean and classic, and an octagonal table takes the space an island might, carrying contrast (and avoiding pointy corners).
In the dining room, a custom glass table with rounded edges gives the family plenty of space to gather without adding visual clutter.
“I’m really big on sculptural restraint,” Locante says. “I didn’t even know I was, actually, until I was doing an interview with Jill Waage, who’s the editor-in-chief for Traditional Home. She was like, ‘Tell us about your use of sculptural restraint here.’ And, ‘Oh, look at the sculptural restraint here.’ I was like, ‘If that’s sculptural restraint, then I’m the queen of it.’”
Restraint comes easy; magazine pieces and publicity, for the “incredibly private and shy” designer, less so. You won’t find photos of Locante on her Instagram feed, @cassandralocante, and even the captions on her project carousels retreat to let the work speak for itself.
“Do we really need another narcissist on the internet?” she says, laughing as the Friday-afternoon line for Kelsey Montague’s “wings” mural snakes two blocks down in the buzzing Gulch. She’s not a doctor; she’s not trying to be an influencer, either.
“I’m a designer, and I’m ultimately in service to the client and always in service to the space I’m designing in,” Locante says. “I just want to do my spaces justice.”
