Renaissance Nashville Hotel ★★★★

A 1987 Convention Tower Rebuilt Around a Guitar

Renaissance Nashville Hotel opened in 1987 as the Stouffer Nashville Hotel, took the Renaissance name in 1996, and has stood 31 stories and 649 rooms over downtown ever since, long enough to have outlasted the convention center it was once bridged to across Commerce Street. A full renovation led by Gresham Smith and Premier Project Management reworked four floors of public space, lobby, restaurant, lounge, and meeting rooms, around a brief calling for “wanderlust” balanced against an authentically local, maker-made aesthetic rather than the generic business-hotel look the tower had carried for three decades. The project moved through eight construction phases to keep the hotel running the whole time, a detail that matters for a convention property that can rarely afford to go fully dark for a renovation of this size.

Why It Works

We selected Renaissance Nashville Hotel because its signature feature commits fully to its concept rather than gesturing at one: the Guitar Atrium is shaped, structurally, like the body of a guitar, not decorated with a guitar motif painted on somewhere. That same specificity carries through a Johnny Cash mural, retro microphone sconces, and braided rope sculptures, details a convention hotel of this scale could easily have skipped in favor of neutral carpet and abstract art. The renovation team's stated goal, balancing high and low finishes around a maker aesthetic, shows up in small choices as much as the big ones, like swapping a standard hotel bar for a restaurant and lounge built to feel like a local hangout rather than a branded outpost.

Why This Location

The hotel sits at the northwest corner of the 5th + Broadway development, in the heart of downtown Nashville and an easy walk from Broadway’s honky-tonks and Bridgestone Arena. It remains one of the city’s largest conference hotels, making it a practical, well-connected base for a convention trip as much as a music-focused weekend. Thirty-one stories of guest rooms also mean reliable availability during Nashville's busiest convention and tourism weeks, when boutique properties nearby sell out first.

Fast Facts

• Price: €€€

• Vibe: music-themed maker aesthetic, convention-scale

• Chambres: 649 rooms, including 24 suites, across 31 stories

• Best For: conference travelers, music fans, groups

• Our Favorite Thing About the Hotel: the Guitar Atrium, built to the literal shape of the instrument

• Dining: a reimagined lobby restaurant and lounge built as a local hangout

• Amenities: 31,000 sq ft of meeting space across 25 rooms designed as individual stages

• Attractions: Broadway honky-tonks, Bridgestone Arena, 5th + Broadway

The Guitar Atrium, Explained

The atrium’s maple-and-walnut ceiling stands in for a guitar’s sound hole, cold-rolled steel strings run the length of the space overhead, and metal straps shaped into a guitar pick complete a design that reads as architecture first and metaphor second. It is the kind of feature that would collapse into kitsch handled less precisely, and the renovation team’s decision to build it as a structural centerpiece rather than a photo-op prop is what keeps it from tipping that way. Guests crossing the lobby pass directly beneath the steel strings, which puts the detail to work as wayfinding as much as spectacle.

Meeting Rooms Built Like Stages

Each of the hotel’s 25 meeting rooms was designed as an individual stage, with its own lighting rig and a distinct metal ceiling treatment, a choice that turns a convention center's worth of anonymous function space into something with actual character. Elsewhere in the public areas, a gold-and-silver denim wall tapestry, a Johnny Cash mural, and a rotating wood-block art installation keep the Nashville references varied rather than repeating the same guitar imagery on every wall, while wall swing benches give the lobby an unexpectedly playful detail for a 649-room hotel. Taken together, the public spaces read less like a renovated convention hotel and more like a venue that happens to also rent rooms, which is precisely the reputation the brief was chasing.