When Nashville's city fathers commissioned architect James Edwin Robb Hunt to design a grand hotel for the corner of Sixth Avenue and Union Street, they wanted something that would announce the city's ambitions to the world. Completed in 1910 at a cost of approximately one million dollars, The Hermitage Hotel rose six stories in a Beaux-Arts composition of white Georgia marble, its facade layered with Corinthian columns, arched windows, and decorative cartouches that still stop pedestrians cold more than a century later. The lobby, visible in the images, remains one of the most extraordinary interior spaces in the American South — a soaring double-height hall where gilded plasterwork, trompe-l'oeil painted panels, and a magnificent stained-glass skylight articulate a room that has witnessed Tennessee's suffrage movement, presidential campaigns, and countless moments of state. A recent restoration brought the interiors into dialogue with their Edwardian bones without softening what makes them exceptional. The 122 guestrooms now carry a quiet contemporary register — upholstered headboards in warm greige linen, sage-green patterned carpets, dark walnut case pieces with brass hardware — that defers to the architecture rather than competing with it. The hotel's bar, tucked beneath an ornate coffered ceiling with original plasterwork intact, pairs a veined marble counter and blush-upholstered stools against deep navy velvet seating, brass pendant lights casting the whole room in amber. The Pink Hermitage café terrace, framed by clipped boxwood spheres against that white marble facade, gives the street corner the particular ease of a hotel that has never needed to prove itself.

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