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.
-
Here’s what to order (and admire) at Carbone LondonNew York’s favourite, and buzziest, Italian restaurant arrives in the British capital, marking the brand’s first expansion into Europe
-
Griffin Frazen on conceiving the cinematic runway sets for New York label Khaite: ‘If people feel moved we’ve succeeded’The architectural designer – who helped conceive the sets for ‘The Brutalist’ – collaborates with his wife Catherine Holstein on the scenography for her Khaite runway shows, the latest of which took place in NYFW this past weekend
-
How to travel meaningfully in an increasingly generic worldLauren Ho explores the need for resonance, not reach, in the way we choose to make journeys of discovery
-
New furniture from Maiden Home elevates elemental materials through unique designFinely crafted and exquisitely formed, the New York furniture brand’s latest designs find their perfect showcase at a modernist Californian home
-
Wallpaper* USA 400: The people shaping Creative America in 2025Our annual look at the talents defining the country’s creative landscape right now
-
Workstead's lanterns combine the richness of silk with a warm glowAn otherworldly lamp collection, the Lantern series by Workstead features raw silk shades and nostalgic silhouettes in three designs
-
Can creativity survive in the United States?We asked three design powerhouses to weigh in on this political moment
-
Murray Moss: 'We must stop the erosion of our 250-year-old American culture'Murray Moss, the founder of design gallery Moss and consultancy Moss Bureau, warns of cultural trauma in an authoritarian state
-
‘You can feel their presence’: step inside the Eameses’ Pacific Palisades residenceCharles and Ray Eames’ descendants are exploring new ways to preserve the designers’ legacy, as the couple’s masterpiece Pacific Palisades residence reopens following the recent LA fires
-
2025’s Wallpaper* US issue is on sale now, celebrating creative spirit in turbulent timesFrom a glitterball stilt suit to the Eames House, contemporary design to a century-old cocktail glass – the August 2025 US issue of Wallpaper* honours creativity that shines and endures. On newsstands now
-
‘Boom: Art and Design in the 1940s’ explores the creative resilience of the decadeNoguchi and Nakashima are among those who found expression and innovation in the adversity of the 1940s; take a walk through the Philadelphia Museum of Art exhibition
