Downtown snags a new retail tenant (corrected version)

Furnishings store serves the urbanite loft dwellers

Email | Print By Richard Lawson

Correction: The original story posted yesterday incorrectly reported that Mad Mod was moving from its Belmont Boulevard location. It is staying there and opening a second location. Sorry for the screw up. The corrected version follows.

Nashville has a new downtown retail resident. Mad Mod, a modern furnishings store on Belmont Boulevard, is in the process of opening a store in the Berger Building on Eighth Ave., formerly the Toy Museum.

The store technically opened last Saturday. But the showroom is still being put together. Chris Seatveit, who owns the store with his wife Cyndi, said the new store would be fully stocked in about a month because of the shipment schedules for furniture. It will have a pretty good stock over the next two weeks, he said.

Downtown supporters hope to attract more retailers like Mad Mod, said Tom Turner, director of the Nashville Downtown Partnership. It’s retail not geared toward tourists and supports the growing crowd of downtown residents.

That seems to be the cycle in urban areas everywhere. As downtown areas, in particular, revive with residential, small to medium locally owned retail emerges. And it usually reflects the shopping and decorating tastes of urbanites – boutique clothing stores, specialty food shops and modern décor of sleek, minimalist designs. Washington Boulevard in St. Louis, for example, saw these shops spring up as the old factories lining the street were converted to lofts.

Mad Mod targets urbanites with modern furnishings and home decor. “We had been looking at downtown locations for probably eight months,” Chris Seatveit said. He said the store needed to expand, and the space came up at the right time. But it also was more convenient for new residents of downtown lofts and condominiums as well as the other urban areas, he added.

Interestingly, Mad Mod’s trek to downtown started in the suburbs four years ago. It first opened in the economically challenged Bellevue Center four years ago. About two years ago, it moved to the Belmont location, a couple of houses down from Bongo Java across from Belmont University.

The Berger Building came available after Joshua Smith and his partners, including family members, bought the building in early October for $1.5 million. They are the owners of the Standard Restaurant at the Smith House across Eighth, a 166-year-old house that was a bed and breakfast for years before the Smith family acquired it in October 2005 and renovated the house.

Mad Mod has most of the first floor. A coffeehouse is planned for another portion of the first floor. The second floor of the Berger Building has residential space.