Southall is a latest luxe farm resort just outside Nashville

Southall, a latest luxury farm resort just outside Nashville, Tenn., is as all-American as a Norman Rockwell painting. 

Opened in December, the property is a real working farm, with expansive apple orchards, formal kitchen gardens, acres of land for foraging wild edibles, and 15,000 square feet of hydroponic and traditional conservatory greenhouses to maintain the harvests going all 12 months round.

All that land allows guests to meander along 5 miles of climbing trails through old-growth forest, kayak and paddle board across the 7-acre Lake Mishkin and pull up chairs by the outdoor fire pits. 

Unlike a Norman Rockwell painting, Southall packs in luxury perks like a 15,000-square-foot spa with eight individual treatment rooms and two couples suites, in addition to an all-season heated pool overlooking the lake. 

All-day dining at Sojourner offers southern favorites on a menu which evolves day by day depending on what’s fresh, and this spring will bring the debut of a signature dinner restaurant called January.

An authorized canning kitchen — dubbed the Jammery (how Rockwellian is that?) — serves as a demo space for culinary education, pickling and canning workshops, and tastings of the resort’s local honey. 

“Our honey tastings have been extremely popular,” said executive chef Andrew Klamar. Southall’s honey has been recognized as top-of-the-line within the country, winning Good Food Awards in 2020 and 2022, before the resort even opened to guests. “One among the jokes we tell throughout the honey tastings is that we hope when our guests go home, they take their squeeze bear of honey out of their cabinets and throw it out. Ours is that good.” 

While Nashville has seen a hurricane of hotel development lately, it oddly lacked a real resort property.

Southall, nevertheless, opened just half-hour outside the guts of Music City within the satellite suburb of Franklin — a longtime refuge for country music stars. The placement made sense. Franklin has develop into the American South’s place to be, with an estimated population just shy of 90,000 — up sevenfold from a mere 12,407 in 1980. 

“Nobody has ever built an amenity like this here before,” said founder Paul Mishkin, who worked in Chicago’s securities and options trading industry for 40 years before coming to Tennessee in 2013 with the concept of developing a farming-focused real estate investment. He fell in love, as many have, with the region’s temperate climate, rolling hillsides and unpretentious air. 

“I had never seen anything like this area,” said Mishkin. “And the land was inexpensive relative to what I assumed the worth might be.” 

He bought the primary parcel of what would eventually develop into Southall a 12 months later in 2014, and slowly began accreting nearby parcels right into a 325-acre property — the one problem was that the land had virtually no infrastructure. 

“I learned that it is largely unimaginable to take raw land with no utilities, a 1-inch water pipe and a few electrical from town,” said Mishkin. “I took this raw land and like ‘Sims City,’ turned it into something. It was a large undertaking with zoning and bringing within the resources.” 

Southall was created over greater than seven years of development. The prices and challenges of constructing a working agriculture-focused hotel from scratch were significant, but it surely’s an idea that’s already been proven. 

Blackberry Farm, a Relais & Chateaux property situated 200 miles east in Walland, Tenn., has capitalized on (and, some would say, pioneered) the luxurious farm model since first opening in 1990.