American nostalgia and southern charm come together at Eastside Bowl, a former big-box department store space turned bowling alley, diner, arcade and music venue in Nashville, Tennessee. Designed by Cowboy Creative, the in-house creative studio of the hospitality brand Urban Cowboy, the dormant K-Mart building, spanning 33,000 square feet, stands transformed in a postmodern, atomic style that blends various influences from the 1950s to the 1980s.
Eastside Bowl: step inside
‘We wanted to elicit a dream-like state from the moment you entered the front door. The building was a massive run-down K-Mart with soaring 50-foot ceilings, so the scale of everything needed to be exaggerated,’ says Lyon Porter, co-founder of Urban Cowboy and Cowboy Creative. ‘We took huge inspiration from the Big Lebowski dream sequence and the second that carpet went down, we knew we had something special.’
Together with the studio’s head of design, Frank Favia, Lyons guided the team towards implementing plenty of custom-designed features, such as the immense carpet emblazoned with a vibrant pattern in an oversized scale by Xee Summers, hand-pressed letterpress bowling pin wallpaper by Clint Van Gemert of Printburg, gold paint accents created from the exact paint recipe that Gibson Guitars uses for its iconic Gold Top guitars, and even a 1950s disco ball, sourced from the Round Top antiques show in Texas.
The maximalist vision is all-encompassing, from the floor to the walls and almost every corner of the venue – a shared attribute amongst all of Urban Cowboy’s properties, which includes its original outpost in the Catskills, New York, a sister Urban Cowboy in Nashville, and a retro motel, bar and swim club in Nashville called The Dive.
Through the incorporation of all these details, the building’s vast size feels inviting, warm and exciting. Fitted with banquette seating (white leather in the diner, black by the bowling lanes and green in the bar), laser-cut screens and chevron-shaped dropped ceiling features, Eastside Bowl captures all the camp and kitsch flavour of a bygone era while also bringing it up to date.
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