An Aesthetic Sweet Spot
Tucked inside the historic Boat House at 94 E. Main Street—perched right along the Harpeth River—Perenn arrived in Franklin last spring from husband-and-wife team Aubrey and Tyler O'Laskey, who've been quietly building one of the most thoughtful hospitality concepts in the country out of Reno, Nevada. Their Franklin outpost is a bakery and café by day, a European rotisserie and bistro by night, and an interior design love letter every hour in between.
We finally went to experience it for ourselves and we took notes on everything!
Rustic European Meets Warm Americana
The design was a collaboration between the O'Laskeys and Anton Anger of Studio Meadow. The result is deeply considered—warm without being precious, rustic without being rough.
Low wooden ceilings anchor the 2,700-square-foot interior with the kind of intimacy that high ceilings simply can't manufacture. They draw the eye down and in, making the space feel like a room you were already meant to be in. The historic Boat House bones do a lot of the heavy lifting here, but the design leans into them rather than fighting them.
Upholstered booths line the walls—a classic European café move that creates natural gathering pockets without over-furnishing the space. There's also counter seating and riverside tables, giving the room a layered social logic: solo coffee drinkers, couples, families, and groups all have a natural place to land.
The hand-painted espresso machine by artist Darin Stockwell, rendered in Perenn's signature deep, moody dark green, functions as the room's anchor piece. It's art that works—functional sculpture at the heart of the service counter. And the paintings by Renee Evans throughout the dining room give the walls a collected, curated quality that no print-on-demand solution could replicate.
Together, the design bridges old world and new—a phrase that could easily sound like a cliché, but here genuinely describes what's happening. It feels earned.
How to Bring It Home: The Perenn Aesthetic for Residential Spaces
Before you can recreate a feeling, it helps to be able to name it. Perenn's aesthetic sits in a very specific sweet spot—European countryside meets Southern boathouse. It's not farmhouse, not industrial, not coastal. The closest shorthand is organic European transitional: grounded in natural materials, historically informed, but never precious or period-specific. French provincial filtered through a Tennessee river town. The kind of space that feels discovered rather than designed.
That quality (unhurried, crafted, quietly confident) is exactly what we aim for in residential design. And it's more achievable than it looks.
Start with the ceiling. Perenn's low wooden ceiling is the first thing you register when you walk in. In residential design, this translates to embracing exposed wood beams, or adding warmth overhead through stained wood plank ceilings in a kitchen, dining room, or screened porch. The goal is to bring the sky closer—to make the room feel held.
Commit to a signature color. Perenn's deep, dark green isn't shy. It appears on the espresso machine, carries through the branding, and creates a visual throughline across the space. In a home, this looks like a deeply saturated lacquered kitchen island, a painted built-in, or a single dramatic wall in a moody library green or charcoal. Pick one and commit. Half measures read as indecision.
Invest in upholstered seating that stays. The booth seating at Perenn communicates something critical: you're welcome to settle in. In residential spaces, this means anchoring a dining room with a built-in banquette, or choosing generously proportioned upholstered chairs that signal comfort before anyone sits down.
Let art be collected, not curated to match. When you're pulling together art for a home, resist the urge to source everything from the same palette or era. A mix of mediums, scales, and periods creates the sense that a space has a history, even when it's new.
Think about the threshold. Part of what makes Perenn's Franklin location so effective is its relationship to the Harpeth River—the outdoor patios and riverside tables create a progression from interior to exterior that makes the whole property feel larger and more intentional. In residential design, this means treating indoor-outdoor transitions as designed moments rather than afterthoughts. A screened porch, a covered terrace, a view corridor. These can transform how a home feels from the inside.
Choose materials with longevity. Perenn's space looks like it has always been there because the materials, wood, paint and upholstery, are the kind that age into themselves rather than dating. When we specify finishes for our clients, this is always the question: will this look better in ten years, or just different? Perenn answers it correctly.
Go Visit
Perenn Franklin is open daily from 7am–2:30pm, with dinner service Thursday through Saturday, 5–9pm. Reservations are available through Resy.
94 E. Main Street, Franklin, TN 37064
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