How Nashville Star Designer Lori Paranjape Used

Artistic Tile to Create her Family's Forever Home

The opening of Artistic Tile’s Showroom and Slab Gallery at the new Nashville Design Collective occurred at a signal moment in Nashville’s stunning evolution from “Music City” to a design-driven, luxury-focused metropolitan center, the capitol of the mid-South. The showroom and gallery immediately drew Nashville’s finest designers and architects, bringing with them projects that ranged from gracious homes on legendary Belle Mead Boulevard to penthouses in new construction towering over the city. Among the most interesting of all was a designer’s own home, especially because the designer was the charismatic and talented Lori Paranjape. Lori’s company, Mrs. Paranjape Interiors and Design, has been a beacon of beautiful, livable design in Nashville for over a dozen years. While masterminding her team’s work on a multitude of projects all over the region and the country, Lori spent two of those years creating a new home for her family in a leafy Nashville suburb, and the results are a testament to the marriage of exceptional natural materials and Lori’s signature design ingenuity. For Lori, having the Nashville Design Collective as her most relied-upon showroom resource was a game-changer, sharing that “our projects have changed tremendously over the past 12 years. Our budgets are quite different and our partners and resources, craftspeople, all aspects of design have really increased. It’s something we’ve really worked hard to do, to have tight relationships with the people with whom we do business. We feel great about the work that they’re going to do with our projects and our clients can feel confident that we’re going to deliver a spectacular result. And now, having the Nashville Design Collective has been tremendous! To have the NDC access for designers, myself and my colleagues, we have an opportunity to book multiple appointments, to visit Artistic Tile and make our tile and slab selections. Then we go work on our lighting, and we can go across the hall and work on cabinetry. It’s efficient, and it also allows us an opportunity to take care of something in the same day, while everything is fresh for us. And it feels a bit more cohesive, having this resource.”

The heart of this new home is Lori’s kitchen. “The genesis of the kitchen was that we are a casual family. We want conversation while we cook, we want our kids and friends sitting at the island, or someone relaxing just across the room, and we're interacting. We built it to have ample surfaces to prepare meals and to cook, with separate surfaces for cleaning, I think it's beautiful, but perhaps my favorite part is that I can live here comfortably and in a relaxed way, and I'm not tense about guests, or someone touching something. It really is relaxed and beautiful all at the same time.” The palette of this space, grand in size but intimate in vibe, is a warm beige, achieved via the use of two main materials: leathered Naica quartzite slab, and Zellige ceramic tile, which Artistic Tile has hand-made in Morocco. “The leathering of the slab really was essential to making this feel beautifully tactile yet practical. Naica was the perfect surface for that. And it is living up to its durability. We use this space. We prepare things on this island. We cut vegetables, that’s wet work.

Before we wipe up, there are rings from the wine glasses. But after we're through and we tidy things up, it looks just like it did the day it was installed, which was very important to us. I was drawn to Zellige because of the hand-made look. I wanted this home to feel relaxed and Zellige gives us a casual, dressed-down feeling by being imperfect, which allows the beauty of each hand-made piece to shine without it being glaring or too assertive. It is the perfect backdrop for us. Once we decided on Naica for the countertops and Zellige for the walls, I wanted those two to be the stars and not have any competition. A stainless hood was out, and a plaster hood was out, and I decided that the most beautiful of all was the Naica. So, she got the crowning moment in the kitchen! I have several favorite places in my home. There isn't a day that passes that someone in my family doesn't say, ‘Is this really for us? Is this ours?' If I had to pick, I would have to say my favorite room in the house is our kitchen, because this is where we live."

‌ A moment away from the kitchen is a mudroom entrance, which Lori chose to outfit with a fresh take on a timeless choice – a stone checkerboard floor. In keeping with the elegant but relaxed mood found here, she ‌rejected the formality of black-and-white, and instead chose the dark ‌taupe-and-cream of two limestones: Grey Foussana and Jerusalem Pearl. These stones were custom cut for Lori in Artistic Tile’s New Jersey headquarters, as part of the ‘Tailored To’ program, which ensures immaculate modulation when installed.

Upstairs, in her own primary bath, Lori selected a variety of natural stones: marble, limestone and serpentine. Walls of intricately carved, linear Pannelli tile in pale-grey Smoke limestone meet the discreet charm of a circular mosaic floor in Calacatta Gold marble. Lori grounded the room via an especially fresh floor: Artistic Tile’s newly introduced Nuovo Reale, a textured and gently antiqued Serpentine tile quarried in the Italian Alps. “I chose that green in our bathroom, which for some would be a wild choice. It’s the most natural peaceful green that feels like you can picture it growing out of the earth, so all of those natural tones felt right at home here.”

‌ Lori’s love for Naica quartzite led her to use it once more, in her son’s bath. Atop a vanity in rich navy, it creates a witty homage to the classicism of “blazer and chinos”, perfect for a young gentleman’s space, one that gets a charge of Mid-Century Modern style with walls of Corda Blanca Bianco Carrara, bath floors of stainless steel studded Aviator Sea Grey, and Doge White’s optimistic marble triangles as the mosaic shower floor.

In her daughter’s bathroom, Lori decided to “Think Pink”, but in the most refined way. “I chose tumbled Calacatta Rosa and tumbled Rosa Portogallo. I wanted it to be feminine, but, again, I wanted timeless. The floor has the most color, and the tumbled nature takes a bit of an edge off the color and gives a softness under foot. The walls have just a suggestion of color, so it lives a bit like wallpaper. I think tying those two surfaces together, but using the different materials was very effective, in adding subtlety instead of coating every surface in a dominant or more assertive way. It takes a moment for people to say; ‘is that pink?’ instead of, ‘look at that pink!’, and I love that distinction!”

Back on the main floor, one more space beckons with a literal glow: “When I was designing the bathrooms and kitchens for our home in Artistic Tile at the Nashville Design Collective, I fell head over heels with Vanilla Onyx. I would have wanted it everywhere, which seemed mildly crazy, so I decided to use it in reasonable doses. And we ended up having what I think is the most beautiful guest bathroom ever: the walls, the texture and all those things. We took that Vanilla Onyx one more time but turned it completely sideways and used the cross-cut slab in our formal powder room. As you know, Onyx can be lit from behind, it radiates light so that entire powder room was designed around the Vanilla Onyx Cross Cut. The vanity has a sturdy frame hidden behind the Onyx, which is completely lit from within. And that is maybe the only light that we never turn off in this house!”