Few groups leave Nashville without sampling its iconic country side.
Mears Fox, vice president of meeting services for The Key Event & Helen Moskovitz Group (www.thekeyeventgroup.com)—a leading Nashville DMC—says the Wildhorse Saloon, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum and General Jackson Showboat remain popular as private event venues.
But Music City strums more than country these days, and there are an array of other sites in the city that can add unexpected style apart from the traditional, she maintains.
“We try to dig deeper with clients to find out what they need from an off-site venue,” Fox says. “If, for example, they want a high-style video presentation, the Country Music Hall isn’t going to work for them. Nashville has several great venues that don’t have name recognition but can often fulfill objectives and bring ‘wow’ to a lot of events.”
One of Fox’s personal favorites is Belle Meade Plantation.
“With its history as a beautiful antebellum home and gardens, it enables us to be very creative with large tented events at least nine months of the year, or an elegant dinner in the carriage house anytime. Once we tented one of the paddocks and used a circus theme. Sometimes we bring in elements of the plantation’s history as a horse breeding farm and have riders talking about how the animals get trained for racing.”
The Frist Center for the Visual Arts’ historic lobby is another piece of historic Art Deco architecture downtown Fox says is an artful setting for seated dinners for about 100 guests.
“It can offer a night of elegance to complement another night of casual—for jeans and barbecue somewhere out in the country like Smiley Hollow, where we do hay rides, horseshoes and barn dances,” she says.
Music City’s premier new downtown venue is the $125 million Schermerhorn Symphony Hall.
“The tech-equipped main hall has a fabulous flexible floor where orchestra level seats may be lowered to reveal an ornate Brazilian cherry and hickory parquet floor, ready for dancing, or bistro tables for a jazz night,” she says. “You can have food stations and mini string groups throughout the hall, and stage a rock/country band in the main hall for dancing.”
But downtown elegance doesn’t have to be limited to the new symphony hall, Mears maintains. Groups who’ve done casual in Wildhorse Saloon may return to that space for a very different experience.
“We’ve staged an elegant awards dinner in there,” she says. “By covering up the murals, horses and neon on the walls, and adding specialty lighting, ice sculptures and feathers, we created a warm ambient feeling.”
Nashville wow, she says, comes in an array of styles.
