I want to tell you about Perenn Bakery. But really, I want to tell you why we do this at all.
Perenn is Tyler and Aubrey O'Laskey's project — a bakery turning out the kind of European croissants you plan a morning around, with spaces so beautiful you want to move in. We didn't find them at a trade show. We found them through Anton of Studio Meadow, their designer, who went to high school with Aubrey and reconnected with her years later in New York. He shapes their world now. And somewhere along the way, he brought us in.
That's almost always how the best projects start. Not with a sale. With a relationship.
Here's what tells you everything about that relationship: we were working with them long before they ever came to Nashville. Perenn's roots are out west, in Reno and Lake Tahoe, and one of the first spaces we got to be part of was Claio, their Greek-ish rotisserie out there. So by the time they landed in Tennessee, this wasn't a new vendor and a new client feeling each other out. It was old friends, picking up in a new city. When you've already built something beautiful together two thousand miles away, the trust comes with you.
In Franklin, we put white tile behind the register, where you can see straight back into the bakery. On Sidco Drive, we did a green tile full of variation, with a checkerboard floor and hand-painted walls. Aubrey told me the space used to look like nothing — and now it feels like the tile was always there. That's the whole magic. Handmade tile doesn't look installed. It looks like you inherited it.
Now we're deep into their new Wedgewood-Houston grocery, and this one has my whole heart. Perenn is named for perennial flowers — something Tyler has always loved — so we're making them a one-of-a-kind botanical piece for the restrooms. Real perennials, in ceramic, that'll never leave the wall. A bakery named for flowers that come back every year, with flowers that stay forever. I mean, come on.
Here's the part I can't get over. Build-outs are expensive, and every project hits the moment where someone asks what really has to make it to the finish line. Sometimes that's us. We get it.
But when the budget talk came, Aubrey held firm — more than once. It has to be Red Rock. No swaps.
That kind of thing makes me want to give her the biggest hug and maybe cry a little, because it means something to us too. When someone protects your craft inside their own dream, you don't forget it. You show up for them completely.
So if you're building something — a restaurant, a hotel, a bar, a wild idea on a napkin — here's what I want you to know. Your space matters to us. If you let us in, we don't phone it in. We're there for as much or as little as you need. What we make isn't just a finish; it's utilitarian art, something your people will touch every single day, hopefully for a very long time to come.
We visit. We send our friends. We keep telling the story alongside you for years, across cities, across whatever comes next. Because the story doesn't stop at the install.
And if we get to be part of yours? We'd be honored.
Building something? Come tell us about it. Let us do what we're good at.