Silo Studios is Now Open + Dowdle Wins Award for L&L Market
Featured Place You Want to Go
Silo Studios | The Nations
We’re excited to announce that Silo Studios, an 80,000-square-foot office and retail complex is officially completed and open!
For those who aren’t familiar with the project, it was an old lumber mill located at the corner of Centennial Blvd. and 54th Ave. N. in The Nations that Dowdle helped convert into an office and retail complex. We worked with Charleston, South Carolina-based developers Flyway to renovate and repurpose the space. We kept as many of the original elements as possible, including some of the remaining mill equipment, the tongue-and-groove hardwood flooring and the unique bow truss structure.
In fact, Silo Studios is one of the largest remaining bow truss structures in Nashville. The building spans 137 feet from one side to the other, with no intermediate structures or columns in between. The entire roof system is bearing on the outside walls. While we’ve worked on smaller bow truss buildings, like the one that houses Adele’s in the Gulch, it was a privilege to be involved in the effort to restore such a unique space.
Of course, renovating a 1950s-era, abandoned building like this comes with its challenges. It was in very bad shape – extensive water damage, structural damage, and even holes in the walls and roof that the previous owners made to remove large equipment from the building.
However, thanks to the regular interaction with the team of experts we were working with, we were able to work through each issue that came along and ensure a solid product.
This is a project that Dowdle has been working on for over two years, and it’s always thrilling to get to the end of something great. We hope it’s a pillar of The Nations community for years to come!
For more about the project, check out these recent news stories:
From the President
You may have seen in the local news that we completed another adaptive reuse project last year: L&L Market on Charlotte Pike. The 55,000-square-foot retail, restaurant and office marketplace was created out of a 100-year-old property that most recently housed a restaurant supply warehouse.
What’s been so great about this building is that this has become an ongoing project for us and our architectural partners Southeast Venture Design, as we have both been commissioned by tenants to build out their individual retail spaces within the marketplace.
It’s been great being part of the whole process from start to finish and seeing how this community has come to life. The development as a whole turned out really well, especially considering the deteriorated building we started with. Now, it’s becoming a thriving spot for small businesses to set up shop.
In addition, we’re thankful to have been recognized for our work on this project by the Nashville chapter of the Urban Land Institute in their 2020 Excellence in Development Awards. We were given this honor along with several other well-done developments in Nashville, and we’re proud to have ranked among them.
We look forward to more build-outs, as well as new project opportunities that come from this one.
– Glynn Dowdle, president of Dowdle Construction Group
To get updates on our latest projects, subscribe to our quarterly newsletter here.