Nashville / Interior Plants for Nashville Mixed-Use Developments
In a mixed-use district, nobody owns the middle
Planting for Nashville's mixed-use developments — the shared ground floors, courtyards, concourses and amenity levels where an office tenant, a restaurant and a resident all pass through the same space.
The districts
Nashville Yards runs to nineteen acres with more than two million square feet of office, 673 residential units, two hotels and over seven acres of plazas, courtyards and green space. Fifth + Broadway holds 367,000 square feet of office, 250,000 of retail and 381 apartments on 6.2 acres.
Who manages the middle
Northwood Retail manages Fifth + Broadway. Cousins Properties holds Neuhoff in a fifty-fifty joint venture. Boyle owns and manages Meridian Cool Springs. Convexity owns 5 City. The common areas have a single owner even when the uses do not.
Named work
The Factory at Franklin — over four hundred plants, designed and installed across a 1929 stove works turned retail and event campus.
The hardest planting brief in commercial property
A mixed-use ground floor has to work for an office tenant arriving at eight, a shopper at noon, a diner at seven and a resident coming home at eleven. It has different light at each of those hours, different traffic, and four different standards of what "looks right."
It is also the one part of the development nobody who occupies it is responsible for. An office tenant maintains their floor. A restaurant maintains its dining room. The concourse, the courtyard and the elevator lobby belong to the owner, and they are the spaces that decide what the whole district feels like.
Designing for four uses at once
The resolution is usually fewer, larger, tougher specimens rather than more of them. Heavy-traffic zones need vessels that cannot be knocked over and material that tolerates being brushed past all day. Seating areas can carry finer planting because people are stationary. Courtyards and terraces are an exterior program with wind, freeze-thaw and weight limits of their own.
Where a district has genuine outdoor acreage — Nashville Yards markets more than seven acres of it — the interior and exterior planting should read as one intention rather than two contracts.
Working with the owner rather than the tenants
We contract with whoever holds the common areas, coordinate access through property management, and run weekly or biweekly routes. Plants we installed carry a replacement guarantee, which in a space with this much traffic is not a nicety.
On-site consultation
We walk the space, read the light, and talk through how the room gets used before anything is specified.
Custom plant design
Plant and vessel selection matched to your brand, your light, and the way the space needs to feel.
Delivery and install
Our team pots, places, and cleans up, and leaves care notes for anything you handle yourself.
Ongoing maintenance
Watering, fertilizing, pruning, rotation, and pest treatment on a set schedule, including swapping out anything that stops thriving.
How a project runs
01
Consultation on site
We come look at the space, take light readings, and scope it.
02
Design proposal
Plant and vessel selections with placements and a quote.
03
Install day
Sourced, potted, delivered, placed. Usually one visit.
04
Care route
Recurring maintenance visits on your schedule.
I never have to worry about under or over watering. They make sure everything stays healthy, dust the plants, and keep them looking beautiful and thriving year round.
Plant Savvy is the third vendor I have had at our hotel in three years, and Savannah and her team are the only vendor that truly saw our needs and put our ideas into action.
Frequently asked questions
Do you work with the developer, the manager or the tenants?
Usually the entity that holds the common areas. Individual tenants inside a district are separate agreements and often follow once the common areas are done.
Can you do the interior and the exterior?
Yes, and in a mixed-use district they should be designed together. The exterior runs its own thirteen-step maintenance process with seasonal rotations.
How do you handle a space that is open sixteen hours a day?
Service is scheduled around the quietest window rather than a route day, and that gets agreed with management rather than assumed.
What about a ground floor that is still leasing up?
That is a good moment to plant rather than a reason to wait. An empty concourse with considered planting shows far better than an empty concourse.
Who is responsible if something gets damaged?
Plants we installed are replaced at no cost when the cause was in our control. Damage from the public is a different conversation and we will have it honestly.
Start your project
Tell us about the space and we'll set up a time to come see it.
Related pages
Plant programs for Nashville mixed-use districts — where the office lobby, the retail concourse and the residential amenity floor share one landscape.