Motto by Hilton

Project Statement

Nashville's South of Broadway district has transformed rapidly over the past decade, but nearly all of its new development has occurred on full-block or corner parcels with generous street frontage. The Motto by Hilton Nashville Downtown is a deliberate counterpoint: a 13-story, 260-key lifestyle hotel built on a narrow midblock site with only 60 feet of frontage along 3rd Avenue South. That constraint became the project's defining design opportunity.

The site previously held a single-story restaurant and with an ample surface parking lot. This was a condition once common in SoBro but increasingly rare as the neighborhood densifies and smaller parcels are consolidated. This design embraces the midblock dimension and uses it to produce a building type uncommon in Nashville's current development cycle. The narrow frontage demanded a floor plate and massing strategy that turns limitations into virtues: a compact, efficient tower that reads as a confident, slender presence among its broader-shouldered neighbors.

The arrival sequence is a key design move. Vehicular guests are drawn off of 3rd Avenue into an internal courtyard, removing them from the noise and congestion of the street for a sheltered drop-off experience

This courtyard arrival creates a moment of transition. From the energy of downtown Nashville to the more intimate, curated atmosphere of the hotel, the vehicle drive separates guests from the street condition (while taking up valuable ground floor real estate) so the hotel can make a hospitable greeting. This allows the 3rd Avenue frontage to be given over entirely to the pedestrian experience.

At street level, the building's ground-floor facade employs ornate brick expressions drawn from the historic midblock facade treatments found throughout Nashville's older commercial districts. This contextual gesture connects the building to a vernacular tradition of narrow, richly detailed storefronts that once defined Nashville's downtown streets. The hotel's ground-floor restaurant and bar, further activates the sidewalk and establishes the building as a neighborhood participant rather than a self-contained tourist enclave.

Above the base, the tower organizes 260 guest rooms across a variety of single and double-loaded corridors that were meant to optimize for the 60-foot lot width. The Motto by Hilton’s brand's emphasis on cleverly compact rooms (smaller in square footage but purposefully designed) aligns naturally with the site's dimensional constraints. The result is a building where brand philosophy and urban condition reinforce one another: efficient rooms that lower the barrier to entry for a wider range of travelers, arranged on a floor plate that maximizes the narrow parcel.

The connecting room strategy is central to the hotel's flexibility. Alternating King and Bunk configurations can link up to six rooms, accommodating groups of up to 15 guests. This approach expands the hotel's market well beyond the solo business traveler or couple, welcoming bachelorette parties, family reunions, and touring groups — the social travel occasions that define Nashville's visitor economy. The bunk room typology, still relatively novel in the Nashville market, offers an accessible price point that broadens the demographic reach of a downtown hotel stay.

DESIGN FOR INTEGRATION

The Motto by Hilton Nashville Downtown is a study in integrated design born from constraint. The 60-foot midblock frontage (at a seemingly forgotten parcel of downtown) required architecture, interior design, structural engineering, and brand standards to be resolved simultaneously rather than sequentially. Decisions about the floor plate depth, corridor alignment, and structure were inseparable from decisions about room layout, furniture placement, and guest experience.


The arrival sequence illustrates this integration clearly. The internal courtyard drop-off is not merely a site planning convenience. It is an experiential decision that shapes the ground-floor plan, determines the location of back-of-house functions, and frees the street frontage for the restaurant and pedestrian engagement. Similarly, the connecting room concept required coordination between structural bays, corridor planning, acoustic separation, MEP routing, and interior finishes from the earliest design phases. The ganged connecting rooms are favored to the street condition rather than the internal court to ensure there is a wider range of guestroom options.


The project also integrates the Motto brand's design ethos which consists of compact rooms, communal ground-floor spaces, local character. Rather than applying a templated brand package, the design team interpreted Motto's principles through the lens of SoBro's evolving streetscape and Nashville's tradition of richly detailed midblock facades, producing a building that satisfies brand standards while belonging unmistakably to its city. The building's contribution to the street edge is modest in width but significant in its effect on the block's continuity in that it fills a gap that restores the cadence of the streetwall.


DESIGN FOR ECONOMY

Economy operates at multiple scales in this project. At the urban scale, the building demonstrates that a narrow midblock parcel (that recently has been often bypassed in favor of larger assemblages) can support a viable, high-density hospitality program. This has implications for Nashville's development patterns: it suggests that the city's remaining midblock lots, many of which sit underutilized, are not impediments to growth but opportunities for a finer-grained urbanism.


At the building scale, the compact room typology is an exercise in spatial economy. The Motto brand's smaller guest rooms require less material per key, less energy to condition, and less corridor to serve than conventional full-service hotel rooms, while delivering a guest experience calibrated to the way contemporary travelers actually use a hotel room — as a base for exploring the city, not as a destination in itself. The guestrooms, however, provide everything a traveler needs for a hotel stay with no compromises in spite of the meager 150 square feet provided. The connecting room strategy multiplies the building's programmatic range without adding unnecessary square footage; the same 260 keys can serve individuals, couples, or large groups depending on configuration.


At the guest scale, smaller rooms translate directly to lower nightly rates, broadening access to a downtown Nashville hotel experience that has become increasingly expensive. This economic accessibility aligns the project with Nashville's identity as a welcoming, democratic city and a place where music, food, and culture are meant to be shared widely, not reserved for premium price points.


The project also contributes to the economic vitality of the SoBro neighborhood by replacing an underperforming single-story restaurant and surface lot with a mixed-use building that generates employment, sales tax revenue, and sustained foot traffic along 3rd Avenue. The attainability of Nashville as an accessible tourist destination can live on as musicians on Lower Broadway offer their free entertainment on a daily basis.


DESIGN FOR CHANGE

The Motto by Hilton Nashville Downtown is designed to accommodate change at several time horizons. In the near term, the connecting room system provides day-to-day adaptability: the hotel can reconfigure its inventory from 260 individual keys to various combinations of linked suites in response to booking patterns, seasonal demand, and group travel trends. This operational flexibility is embedded in the architecture itself rather than relying on furniture or signage alone.

In a hospitality market as dynamic as Nashville's, where new brands, operators, and travel patterns emerge rapidly, this hotel offers greater change in how users can be accommodated as hotel guests.

The project also embodies a broader change in how Nashville thinks about urban development. SoBro's growth has been dominated by large-footprint, full-block projects. The Motto demonstrates that midblock infill can be economically viable and architecturally compelling. As Nashville continues to mature as a city, this model of incremental, fine-grained development will become increasingly important for preserving the texture and walkability that make urban neighborhoods worth visiting in the first place.