One of the main characters in the origin story of imogene + willie isn’t a person: it’s a building.

We knew 2601 12th Avenue South, our gas station, was meant to be ours from the moment we spotted it out the window during one of our neighborhood drive-by two years ago. Despite that feeling, we still had about a million questions: Was 12South the right neighborhood for our new business? Could we retrofit the inside of an old gas station to fill the needs of our patternmakers and sewers, who work on the premises?

Enter Nick Dryden, one of Nashville’s premiere architects, and since our first meeting, someone who we think of as a life-long, real deal best friend.

We met Nick on one of those early property-scouting trips, when we stopped by his firm, DAAD to deliver a pair of Willie’s to one of his associates (we sold 250 pairs of limited edition jeans to kick-start our business). At the exact moment one of us opened our mouths to tell him about our dream location, Nick opened his mouth and said, “I want to tell you about a place where I think your business should be” – the gas station, of course. To this day, that’s how are relationship rolls with Nick and his wife, Lina: we all finish each other’s sentences, thoughts and dreams.

He was careful to help us weigh the options of opening in different neighborhoods and buildings, but Nick was always very adamant that the gas station was where we needed to be. He just knew in his gut that everything about this location’s footprint made it the right place for us, from the authentic old storefront with old ties to the neighborhood to the wide space that’s our amazing backyard: it was nothing short of an automotive junkyard when we moved in, but with Nick’s genius it became a gem of a space we use for neighborhood soirees, including our own supper + song series. His awareness and involvement in the renaissance of 12South gave us the encouragement and confidence we needed to jump heads-first into a community whose growth we want to be a part of for years to come.

Nick’s got a real knack for “place making” – the work of rebuilding neighborhoods based not only on their physicality but their potential for growth and social interaction. Place making requires an architect to consider things outside an area’s brick and mortar; they have to take into account the quality of life that the neighborhood can offer existing and potential residents as well as visitors. They also have to think about sustainability, in terms of keeping the area relevant as it grows. Of course, they have to have a great eye and appreciation for the area’s history, too.

We appreciate Nick as a professional and an artist, carrying his family business through a third generation (both his dad and grandfather were noted architects in East Tennessee). But we love him as a friend: his capacity for kindness, loyalty, and humor has no bounds. His taste in women is seriously great, too: Lina is an amazing human being and a wonderful photographer, as you can see from her work here.

A few weeks ago, Nick and Lina braved record-breaking heat to take us on a tour of Germantown, the neighborhood that they call home and, in Nick’s view, a major player in the future of Nashville’s urban re-development.

For me, it’s all about neighborhoods. Whether it’s commercial or residential, what we do at my firm is always neighborhood-centric in one way or another.

One of the things that we really try to suggest to our clients, whether they’re coming to us about commercial, retail, residential or office space, is the importance of consolidation. We encourage people to be a bit transient, to move with the energy of the city. We try to influence where that happens, whether it’s downtown or East Nashville or Germantown or 12South or any of the other great urban pockets we have here in town. Small businesses have fallen victim to the big supermarkets and Wal-Marts over the last few decades, but now we’re experiencing a resurgence of and an appreciation for mom & pop-size local businesses. 12South is a great example of this movement, with imogene + willie as a major player.

In relation to what I do, the thing I love most about Germantown is that it’s a real neighborhood. It’s a community with a great mix of people and services. In addition to being close to the river, it’s the oldest historic neighborhood in the city; the center of Germantown takes up a very small area, only five blocks, but there is actually a pretty high concentration of people living here. It’s been in the process of rebuilding for probably thirty years.

Germantown has played a really important role in my firm’s work over the last ten years. It’s become our home base, and where we’ve learned the most about the dynamics of a revitalizing area and all the social issues and challenges that go along with that. Gentrification is a big challenge for any area. As you make improvements, you have to consider all the history of the neighborhood. You don’t want to erase what’s there and you want to make sure that what you’re adding respects its history. We find ourselves taking on the role of a psychologist, and sometimes archeologist and anthropologist. That’s the stuff that fascinates me and keeps me so interested in neighborhood projects.

Germantown is pretty industrial and has some gritty parts, which make it a real functioning neighborhood. I think that’s what is so exciting about it, because that’s going to end up attracting some really interesting residents and also some interesting businesses, hopefully both simultaneously. We’re zoned as a mixed-use – it’s something the neighborhood really pushed for. You can have a business right next to a single-family house here, which provides a lot of freedom and organic potential for growth. There’s already a lot going on here. Considering how small our population is, Germantown actually has a disproportionate amount of restaurants and services. We have Lazzaroli’s, an Italian market that is one of my very favorite things in Nashville; City House, arguably the best restaurant in Nashville; a coffee shop called DrinkHAus; and Zackie’s Hotdogs, Germantown Café, The Mad Platter, Monell’s…

All these places are located in the historic side of the neighborhood – the part everybody knows as “Germantown.” To me, though, the most exciting, exotic part of the neighborhood is all the light industrial stuff – the area east of Bicentennial Mall and north of the Capitol, all the way to the river. It reminds me of Culver City in L.A. – a wide industrial area with low-scale buildings and a lot of great resources around. A lot of active commerce is already happening here, though not much retail. In terms of green space, though, it has great infrastructure thanks to the mall and the Farmers’ Market.

It takes time to rebuild a neighborhood. The Werthan Lofts project has, by design, taken years to evolve, and it’s done so through five phases. (The history of Werthan Mills is a great Nashville success story: at one point, the Werthans were one of the wealthiest families in the country.) The Werthan project has it all: it’s made great re-use of an amazing building and it’s been a kind of stabilizer for the neighborhood housing market. It brings new people in at every stage of its development. Four are complete; the fifth is just starting. It includes the one commercial component: a second location of the 12 South Tap Room, located in the former boiler room. On the backside of the complex is Werthan Packaging, which is the only part of the company that’s still in operation – for now, at least: the family is about to consolidate and move the business elsewhere. When that happens, the redevelopment of that area of the property will be a game-changer for the area.

A few blocks away on the Cumberland River, the Neuhoff Meat Packing plant is another huge historic complex: at 700,000 square feet, it used to be one of the largest slaughterhouses in the country. It’s an impressive place; it’s hard to walk inside without being kind of wowed. When The McRedmond family acquired the property in the ’90s, the idea was that Neuhoff would become a creative think tank, where individuals or groups could work collectively toward a shared vision for the property. Today, it’s like a little creative village. John Prine’s studio is there. The Jazz Workshop and the Actors Bridge Theater are there. The boot designer Phillip Nappi just opened a showroom and store in one section. Since the building is right on the river, early on the McRedmonds started working with the Cumberland River Compact, a group that focuses on improving the ecology of the river. This is another very important component of improving downtown living: we have to embrace the river.

Neuoff is indirectly one of the things that kept me in Nashville. I moved here in 1996, but always thought I’d eventually move to New York or London, where I’d done a fellowship. When we started our firm in 2000, we did some feasibility work and visioning workshops with the Neuhoff organizers, collectively called the Nashville Culture Arts Project. One of the board members was Mel Chin, a well-known conceptual artist and visionary. His background is in academia and fine arts, and the circles he runs in include incredible architects from all over the world. Out of those connections, he generated a lecture series featuring architects and artists called In-Site.

Even though it was pretty underground locally, In-Site was one of the strongest lecture series in the country during its time. It went on for four or five years. It was huge for me to be involved in something like that and to have interaction with someone like Mel Chin. He’s one of those guys who is very good at pulling information out of you in order to form an idea. He asked me what I liked about being in Nashville, what I would change if I could, and what would keep me here. Through these conversations with him and other architects, I realized that staying in Nashville and becoming a part of its growth and expansion was more invigorating and exciting to me than the thought of moving to a larger city.

My dad still practices architecture in Kingsport, where his father was an architect as well, and I talk to him about this kind of thing a lot. I tell him some of the ideas I’m thinking about – like, the importance of rebuilding neighborhoods in organic and sustainable ways. He just laughs, because the ideas that my generation is celebrating as being so new and groundbreaking are the same ideas that excited his father’s generation. We’re just recycling them.

Actually, I don’t really look at what I’m doing as anything new or breakthrough, but as something that’s fundamental to the urban condition of modern cities. If our cities are going to succeed, we have to have some understanding of what it takes to drive economic development. We have to have some sense of what entices people to populate a neighborhood and what brings people together. I mean, it’s a very easy thing to understand, but it’s a very complex spread.