Ndesign: New Hat Projects

“I just really want a wallpaper that feels like me.”

That creative query equally inspires and challenges Elizabeth Williams, owner of New Hat Projects. Located in the creative hive on “The Hill,” in the district between Nolensville Pike and GEODIS Park, New Hat’s creative studio specializes in site-specific art, pattern design, and collaborations that run the gamut from bespoke wallpaper and custom murals to public art installations.

When it comes to wallpaper, Elizabeth might start with a collage of objects dear to a client. For example, when Kate Ezell’s family wanted to give her a custom wallcovering, New Hat incorporated precious totems, like a wedding invitation engraving plate, sketches of family heirlooms and dogs, snippets of wallpaper from a beloved friend’s entrance hall, pictures of bluebird boxes from the yard, and other highly personal memorabilia.

New Hat wallcoverings might also include custom sketches of clients’ farms and vacation houses, transforming the walls of a room into a landscape of family landmarks.

“Bold and rooted in history” are the words Elizabeth uses to describe her work, which began when she and founding business partner Kelly Diehl collaborated on custom wallpaper for bathrooms at the original Dozen Bakery in 2016. (A version of their iconic hand-themed motif made its way to the new, expanded Dozen in Woodbine this year.)

These days, Elizabeth runs the company in creative collaboration with Dave Meaney. Over the last decade, New Hat has created defining looks — in wallcoverings and millwork — for a portfolio of celebrated restaurants, including Bad Idea, 8th & Roast and Henrietta Red. It was also New Hat that created the epic origami mobile hovering over the bar in the bygone Green Pheasant.

At Southall Farm & Inn in Franklin, the New Hat team walked the property to sketch vistas of rolling farmland, creating wallcoverings that bring the outdoors into the rooms of the luxury resort. At the historic mansion at Belmont University, Elizabeth and Kelly worked with the restoration team to recreate wallcoverings based on remnants of 19th-century gold-leafed paper in Adelicia Acklen’s billiards room. At Germantown Inn boutique hotel, a New Hat wallpaper themed with former presidents covers one area, while a pink design celebrating the suffragists covers another.

Upstairs at East Nashville’s Audrey restaurant, New Hat collaborated with electricians at Hazelwood Laboratories in Columbia, Tenn., to create a firefly-themed wallcovering with blinking LED lights behind the paper.

New Hat’s most ambitious wallcovering to date hangs at the Nashville airport, in Concourse D, where Elizabeth and Dave won an Arts at the Airport commission to weave a mural with 1 million linear inches of Tyvek wristbands, the kind that concertgoers wear. Elizabeth and Dave hired 25 weavers to fabricate the mural based on historic coverlets. Rooted in the history of textiles, the images celebrate creativity in the modern materials of contemporary Music City culture.

“Every symbol tells a story,” Elizabeth says of the quirky imagery in her unique designs. “You can’t pick this out of a catalog.”

Be sure to read the story by our sister publication, the Nashville Scene, for more on Elizabeth and New Hat.