The Printing House
Let me get the awkward part out of the way, because it's also the interesting part. This hotel is named The Printing House and there was never a printing house here. It's new construction, finished in 2025, eleven stories, and what it replaced was a Johnstone Supply warehouse. That's a heating and air parts wholesaler. The Nashville Post reported it that way four separate times across the build.
I'm not saying that to be smart about it. I'm saying it because the story they're actually telling is better than the one people assume, and you'll enjoy the building more if you know which one you're standing in.
The general manager put it plainly in the opening announcement. The hotel is a tribute to the city's printing history, which she tied to the stamping of songbooks and the artists that trade eventually pulled in. That part is real, and it's more specific than most people know.
Printers Alley, four blocks north of here, became Nashville's printing district around 1830. By 1915 it held two large newspapers, ten printing houses and thirteen publishers. Tennessee's first book came off a press here in September of 1803.
Then the churches arrived and the presses never stopped. The Methodist Episcopal Church South started what became the United Methodist Publishing House in 1854. J.R. Graves had the Southwestern Publishing House going by 1855. The Southern Baptist Sunday School Board was set up in 1891. Thomas Nelson moved here in 1972.
Richard H. Boyd founded the National Baptist Publishing Board in Nashville in 1896 and had it running by 1898, down on Second Avenue North. It printed Sunday school lessons, song sheets and hymn books that became standard in Black churches across the South. A Black owned press in Nashville in the 1890s, setting the songs a whole region sang. That's the printing history worth the name.
One caution if you go reading. The big shape note publishing operations mostly weren't in Nashville. James D. Vaughan worked out of Lawrenceburg and Stamps Baxter started in Texas. Nashville's claim is religious publishing and songbooks generally, not shape note specifically.
A finance trade piece called the site a former print factory property. Nothing else says that, and four Nashville Post articles say Johnstone Supply. I think somebody worked backward from the hotel's name. I'm telling you both so you can decide.
There's a wooden type case hung on a wall in this building with real wood type still sitting in it. Go look at it properly, because there's more in there than decoration.
Every piece of type is cast backwards. It has to be, because it prints the right way round. Which means a lowercase p and a lowercase q sitting in a drawer are close to mirror images of each other, and a compositor reading upside down and backwards had to keep them straight. Mind your p's and q's.
Look at the same case and you'll see compartments run empty. A single piece of type is called a sort. A shop low on a letter is out of sorts.
Oxford's 2007 revision found p's and q's comes from children learning their letters. The earliest known use is a Charles Churchill poem from 1763: his A's and B's, and P's and Q's. Michael Quinion's objection to the printing version is the one that settles it for me, which is that nobody can explain why p and q got singled out when b and d have the same problem.
Out of sorts is older still. John Heywood has it in 1562, and sorts doesn't mean type until the 1660s at the earliest. The first recorded use of sorts meaning type is Benjamin Franklin in 1784, writing that his founts were scanty or strangely out of sorts. Franklin was borrowing a phrase that was already two hundred years old and applying it to his own trade. The print shop didn't give us the saying. The saying got loaned to the print shop.
So the type case is telling you something true about printing and something false about English, at the same time, on the same wall. I found that more fun than a lobby full of guitars.
A hundred and eighty seven of them across floors six through eleven. The hotel's own brochure breaks it down as ninety three kings and ninety four queen doubles, and the suites and the private floor rooms are counted inside that number rather than added on top.
Mini bars are stocked with local spirits and snacks. Nobody publishes square footage for any room type, which I looked for and could not find on the hotel site, the brochure or Hilton.
This is the thing to understand about the layout. You don't check in on the ground floor. The lobby, the bar, the café and the terrace are all on five, and there's a fireplace up there you can walk all the way around. The ground floor is the entrance and the garage. Floors two through four are parking.
The hotel publishes no hours for either outlet anywhere on its own website. I checked the page source. Every hour I can give you comes from booking platforms, and they agree with each other: breakfast six thirty to eleven, lunch eleven to three, dinner five to eleven, bar until midnight every night and opening at noon on weekends. Treat that as a good guess and call ahead if you're making a plan around it.
Both outlets read as open to the public. They're listed as a standalone restaurant with public hours, though neither the hotel nor Hilton says so outright.
Valet only. Self parking is listed as not available. Fifty five a night, covered, with in and out privileges and EV charging. This is the single most common complaint in the reviews and it's the thing I'd budget for before anything else. On a two hundred dollar room that's a quarter again on top.
The hotel says steps from Broadway, which is generous. Here's what I measured on the street grid rather than in a straight line.
Book It
Rates move with the Nashville calendar and the hotel publishes none of them, so price two or three dates before you commit. Add fifty five a night for the car.
Visit printinghousenashville.comDeveloped by Sun Development and Management out of Indianapolis, architecture by Ratio, interiors by TKC, branding by Solmark Creative. The facade panels came prefabricated with the windows already glazed in, which is why the stamped pattern lines up the way it does. It's Nashville's second LEED certified hotel.