The Sun Room at the Drift Hotel Embraces Nashville’s Transitional Nature

Even in a city full of dramatic transformations and constant reinvention, the new Drift Hotel — with its Sun Room bar and Dawn coffeeshop — is notable.

Sure, it might just seem like a nice new bar and a nice new hotel in a city with a lot of those. But The Sun Room, Alexis Soler’s new bar at the Drift Hotel Nashville on Interstate Drive, is much more than that. It’s one of Nashville’s increasingly rare liminal spaces — somewhere locals and tourists don’t just coexist, but meet and hang out. That’s the goal, anyway.

It’s also in a physical liminal space, located at an intersection that’s not quite East Nashville but not exactly downtown. The idea behind The Sun Room is transitional too. It’s more than a bar that serves food, but less than a restaurant. It’s also a hotel lobby, and it could be a place for live music or a creative coworking space. 

“I try not to design for Nashville as much as I try to make spaces that Nashville needs, or that [are] lacking for me,” explains Soler, who has been behind several of Nashville’s favorite bars, including the late and still-missed No. 308 and the tiled magnificence of Old Glory.

“I always wanted to do a hotel,” she says. “That was something that’s just been in the back of my mind for some time. I didn’t know how I was going to get there.”

Soler, who is “curator of food and beverage and vibe creator” at the Drift, grew up in Miami, where hotel bars are a regular part of the city’s nightlife scene.

“In Miami, everyone kind of met up at the hotel bar before they went out at night because there were so many great lobbies and great vibes, and that’s kind of what I wanted to do with this. … Hotels are just such interesting places to be.” 

She notes that the trend toward vacation rentals rather than hotels has further siloed visitors. “You go to your Airbnb, you hang out with the people you came with, and you go to Broadway or drink in your Airbnb, and there’s not a moment where you just integrate into the culture.”

“If all my hopes and dreams come true, it’ll be that this place is one where people can spend the day,” Soler says. “They can come here to work, grab coffee, hang out at the bar and the pool and see sunrises to sunsets.

“The cocktail menu is really close to my heart,” she continues. “I wanted to do a program that was more guest-facing. I wanted a bar that was specifically about the guest’s experience. In recent years, we’ve gotten away from that, and made it more about the bartender and how great they are. That’s just to elevate our industry. And so I just wanted it to be super-simple cocktails, with two to three touches. To put the focus more back on the guest and less on the craft.”

The bar menu requires a lot of advance prep on the part of the bar staff, using juices and infusing spirits. But by the time someone orders a Pangea — with smoked red chili, raspberry and mezcal — it’s quick to make and serve. The same is true of the food menu, with tinned fish, cheese boards and oysters.

“Sometimes I just make a menu of something that I want to eat,” Soler says. “It’s just this simple approach. Give me a tinned fish with some accoutrement and some good bread and let me just snack on it. I love sharing food with people I love.”

At Poolside — the bar opening at, yes, Drift’s pool later this spring — the menu will include frozen drinks and buckets of beers.

“I’ve known Alexis for a while, and I’m a big fan of everything she does,” says Edgar Victoria of food truck Alebrije. “I didn’t know what [Drift] was going to be, but if she was involved, I wanted to do it.”

Soler’s vision was to serve Victoria’s Alebrije tacos poolside. He bought a second food truck that is nestled into a custom spot near the poolside bar. The menu will feature tacos and quesadillas, but not exactly what he serves when his other truck is posted up at Never Never or Bar Sovereign. “I try my best to pair the food with the concept,” he says. “I am thinking, like a nice hotel in Miami, we should have one or two seafood items.”

The Sun Room has a small corner that has already served as a stage for live music, and Poolside will host DJs. Movies will play on a screen in the basement, and day passes will be available for locals to use the pool. 

For those who remember what the Drift building used to be — The Stadium Inn — it might be a shock to see the light-flooded lobby with midcentury modern styling, local art, live plants and floor-to-ceiling windows. A lyric from Lambchop’s 2012 song “Gone Tomorrow” kept floating through my head as I recently spent time in the lobby: “The wine tasted like sunshine in a basement.”

The official video for “Gone Tomorrow”  — an aptly named song for Nashville if there ever was one — was filmed at The Stadium Inn. The video, which shined a light on wrestling matches that took place in an old hotel banquet hall between 2005 and 2013, featured the late Joseph “Jocephus” Hudson.

The building has stood on this corner since 1965, and was home to a host of budget hotels before it was The Stadium Inn. Zack Dixon, Drift’s GM, shares “something in between a rumor and a fact”: Elvis Presley, they say, stayed in the hotel before it was The Stadium Inn. (The penthouse now has a gold toilet as a nod to Elvis’ apocryphal visit.) Before it closed, The Stadium Inn was a place where people could rent a room for a week or a night or a month or even a year, and was a safety net for people who couldn’t afford or find housing elsewhere.

The hotel has been completely gutted. Concrete columns — some of which sport faint graffiti — and the concrete floor are the only original elements. The intent was to save some exterior brickwork, Dixon says, but the 2020 tornado had other plans. 

The renovation brought in new soundproof windows — it’s remarkable how little road noise you hear while you stay in a hotel next to the interstate — and art and design elements from the city’s best creative minds, some of whom Soler has worked with on other projects. Dryden Architecture + Design served as the lead architect and designer for the project. There’s tile from Lindsay Sheets’ Red Rock Tileworks (she’s the one who did the tile at Old Glory as well) and custom tapestry room numbers from Relic Home’s Alyssa Spyridon. Britt Soler, Alexis’ sister, is a woodworker who made the striking handles for the hotel’s front door.

Drift, The Sun Room, the Dawn coffeeshop and Poolside are opening their doors in a time of transition for this corner — just as construction has started on the new Tennessee Titans stadium and discussion is underway on what the surrounding East Bank will look like. The hotel’s penthouse — with Elvis’ gold toilet but otherwise understated furnishings — will likely be an in-demand spot for pre-gaming or after-parties for events at the new stadium.

Speaking with the Scene for the 2019 cover story “Hard Times at the Stadium Inn,” Lindsey Krinks — the co-founder of local homeless outreach organization Open Table Nashville — said: “If Stadium Inn closed tomorrow, it would create a silent crisis where dozens — if not hundreds — of vulnerable, economically disenfranchised people hit the streets in even more precarious conditions than they were in before.”

And indeed, Nashville — both right now and in its next phase — needs better safety nets for people in need. That’s not the Drift Hotel’s mission. But unlike many new developments that ignore Nashville’s past, Drift is not trying to operate in a vacuum. Soler is looking at compiling photos from the building’s history to display somewhere in the hotel, and wrestling organizers have reached out to Soler about bringing wrestling back for one night only. She’s undecided but says many folks who have stopped by are enthusiastic about the possibility of a temporary parking-lot event redux.

Maybe Lambchop sings its best again: “You can find me behind the stadium / Along the course of the purling river.”