Exclusive: Overhaul at Music Row Roundabout Targets Grocery, Hotel and Apartments

Exclusive: Overhaul at Music Row Roundabout Targets Grocery, Hotel and Apartments

The owners of 3.4 acres fronting Demonbreun Street, near one end of Nashville’s famed Music Row, intend to redevelop the property with a grocery store, hotel and apartments.

Nashville-based Elmington Capital Group hopes to have a master plan ready in the next two to four weeks, said Dominic Zabriskie, the firm’s director of asset management. That plan would be filed with the Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency.

In an interview, Zabriskie said the plans include a 150-room hotel and 200 residential units. Plans also include a retail space where the company wants to put a grocery store — something coveted by the increasing number of people choosing to live in the city’s urban core.

“We’d like to bookend the site with a hotel and a grocer, and give it a feel like 2525 (West End Ave.), where you have the office building with multistory retail below,” Zabriskie said. “We’re in the very beginning stages, so we don’t have tenants or a design nailed down.”

Sources have told me Publix is keen on Elmington’s site. When asked about Publix, Zabriskie said he could not comment about any particular chain.

The roundabout was undergoing a major makeover even before Elmington Capital disclosed its plans.

The developer Childress Klein is under construction on a 19-story apartment tower with 431 units, located next door to a newly opened 210-unit apartment building, conceived by the developer Faison.

That’s 640 apartments where none existed before. And that doesn’t count other apartment developments underway or in the pipeline, both on Music Row and steps down 16th Avenue, which is one spoke of the roundabout.

Also at the roundabout, plans call for a 19-story hotel to be run by Virgin Group Ltd., the company founded by British billionaire Sir Richard Branson. In between the hotel and Elmington Capital’s property is the nine-story Roundabout Plaza office building, which developer John Eakin opened a decade ago.

Elmington Capital owns the 97,000-square-foot strip of bars, restaurants, retail stores and office space running down Demonbreun Street from the Music Row roundabout. Tenants include the bar Tin Roof and Off Broadway Shoe Warehouse. Elmington and its tenants are trying to rebrand the area as Demonbreun Hill.

Elmington Capital paid $17.7 million in fall 2013 for the property.

Part of that purchase included two parking lots behind the strip, accessible by 16th Avenue South and McGavock Street. Together, those lots cover 1.45 acres — and it’s where a potential grocery store would go.

“The parking is just so tight over here now that in order for us to redevelop the parking lots, we have to build a parking structure to do anything else. That requires us to do a full master plan,” Zabriskie said, since buildings would sit atop the parking garage.

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