A 2016 to-the-studs renovation gave the Folk Victorian cottage on Russell Street a dignified new beginning — space to trace another hundred years of lazy Sundays and New Year’s toasts. It deserved an earned celebration, including a 2018 Historic Preservation Award from Nashville’s Metropolitan Historical Commission.
But for the current owners, the East Nashville property still felt more “house” than “home.” The crisp, clean interior didn’t match their creative energy or playful taste. Even the upstairs playroom, with its built-in bunk made for daydreams, seemed desaturated — more business than play.
So in 2024, and armed with an armful of mood boards and ideas, the homeowners turned to Nashville’s Quinn & Company Design Studio to turn up the saturation.
In the playroom, “they wanted it to feel like ‘Wes Anderson on crack,'” said interior designer and project lead Andrianna Thompson, laughing as she rewinds through some of the Russell project’s more cinematic inspiration points.
Not every space needed to amplify Anderson’s famous whimsy, but across the multiroom reboot, the homeowners “had a pretty clear vision of how they wanted it to feel. They came in and asked us to help build that dream,” Thompson said.
Living the Dream
Thompson was a natural choice to direct the dream building, which wrapped in 2025. The Nashville native’s natural knack aligned precisely with the homeowners’ visions.
“I would say I’m definitely the color lover of the group,” she said. “If someone is like, ‘We want this to be funky and so different than what we’ve seen,’ that’s where I’m strongest.”
For the Russell project, funky and different started in the dining space, a focal point for the home and a jumping-off point for the broader aesthetic.
The homeowners had already chosen and installed a wild wallpaper pattern on the ceiling, gold panthers drawing the eye while stealthily stalking along a dark background. No one in the mix, homeowner or designer, wanted to take that paper down. But the design process can be a jungle.
“We did have to turn it around,” says firm owner/designer Jenn Quinn. “We said, ‘You know, the leopards are facing the wrong direction.’ [The homeowner] was like, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re right.’ And so she had to buy all new paper and have it turned around. But I love it. It’s a really, really cool print … I mean, our owners had great taste.”
The team took that great taste and channeled it into a complete and cohesive design, saturating the once-white walls with earthy Sherwin-Williams Pier and carrying gentle curves across the furnishings, fixtures, and custom arch partitions.
“We wanted to make it feel very warm, very inviting,” Quinn said.
Balancing Acts
Although the home’s front door opens into a sitting room, the dining room commands attention as soon as you cross the threshold — and that has broader design implications.
“You have this darker moment in essentially the middle of the home,” Thompson said, “so we knew we had to somehow marry that as you walk through the front door.”
Vision boards called for a lighter, more formal sitting room that still felt warm and welcoming. It’d also need to align with both the dramatic dining space and the adjacent study, newly imbued with moodier, “dark academia” energy.
In the sitting room, the Quinn team brought balance by keeping the walls, built-ins, and window treatments light and bright, then rooting the space with tones that tip to winter spices or Georgia red clay.
In the blackened blue color-drenched study-music room, a rolling library ladder slides across floor-to-ceiling built-ins stocked with books — a personal, textural backdrop for the homeowners’ baby grand piano.
“They had a lot of nice antique mirrors from family heirlooms,” Thompson said. “So we also wanted to highlight that with a gallery wall, and these lounge chairs where you can kind of sit and relax and enjoy a drink or listen to the homeowner play music. We wanted it to feel cozy.”
The finished music room does feel cozy. And if you A/B the space with its lighter, sparser antecedent, the new design feels utterly transformative, too.
Before this reimagination, the room looked like a lovely but everyday home office. Now, it evokes the energy of a 19th-century parlor — somewhere you might enjoy a cigar and a scotch while tapping along to a ragtime piano.
“That was exactly what we were going for,” Thompson says.
Tools of Transformation
Smaller changes — if they’re the right changes — can have transformative power, too, and this home’s touched-up breakfast nook makes a clear case.
The homeowners weren’t ready to overhaul the whole kitchen yet, so Quinn & Company only took on the nook, a back corner that once housed an awkwardly set sectional. That meant working with a mix of existing colors and pieces, including teal ceilings, walls with a hint of mauve, and deep green seating.
“We were trying to marry all these different colors together,” Thompson recalled. “And then we found this fabric.”
One of those magical prints that makes seemingly disparate details feel familial, the forest-scene fabric became a set of custom Roman shades, and the designers dialed in the details around its coalescing influence.
“It’s actually interesting,” Quinn said, “because they didn’t want us to repaint the kitchen — they said, ‘We may totally rip out this kitchen one day so we don’t want to spend a lot of money repainting walls, repainting the ceiling and all that.’ After we installed all this, they were like, ‘Oh wow, we actually really like our kitchen now.’ Because it didn’t feel so out of pocket anymore.”
Playing for Keeps
Back in the playroom, “out of pocket” wasn’t just accepted, but requested.
Thompson and the team translated “Wes Anderson on crack” into something fresh, fun, and pointedly whimsical, with color-drenched walls, flora-informed patterns and a playful and play-encouraging blend of textures, from plush velvet and scalloped wool to fluted wood and faux fur.
When you look closely, the playfulness comes further into focus. To brighten up the bunk, Thompson added a set of Magdalena Snake Sconces: coiled golden serpents, embossed in botanicals, holding milky globes like prized ostrich eggs.
She picked those out with an alley-oop from the homeowners, who’d chosen a serpent-centric bronze table lamp for the kinda-formal but completely cool sitting room.
That constructive collaboration between client and designer carried through the entire Russell Street project. And it tends to be how the Quinn team works. After years of designing necessarily impersonal spec spaces for homebuilders, Jenn Quinn said she had had enough “house,” and intentionally turned her business toward “home.”
“Starting my own design firm, I wanted to take a different approach and really design for our clients,” she said. “And when you do that, there’s a lot more intention involved. And that creates the memories — that creates these special moments, these special details, that really do stand out more.”
