Mesa owner Jon Dalman, across, got his start renting a bench at makerspace Fort Houston, and today he works with some of the city’s most prestigious architects and designers.
There’s a smaller spray booth downstairs, but it’s going away once they finish the larger one upstairs, near where they’re installing a material lift big enough to drive a car onto. The new conference room is shaping up, along with offices, another bathroom, a porch off the back and a storage/staging area that Dalman figures will probably become an upholstery and experimentation space. They’re also finalizing a party spot to host “Club Mesa” confabs. “We didn’t think we were gonna run out of space anytime soon,” Dalman says, eyeing a sprawling space in flux. “But that’s what’s happening.” The move to bigger digs grew out of layers of necessity. Mesa boomed as Nashville’s hospitality scene boomed, as spaces in hot areas like Wedgewood Houston — where Mesa rented — got sold and swallowed. Dalman saw a chance to engineer a better fit with room to grow. Although the shop construction feels all-encompassing now, he can sense the progress and possibilities. “I came in on Saturday night by myself until like 11 p.m., just to be in the space again,” he says. “There used to be so much
down time, and now it’s like a million miles an hour. But I got to sit in these rooms, and I picked which office I wanted to have. So that’s cool.”
Finding Focus A decade ago, Dalman was a one-man woodworking band sitting in what he remembers as the “dungeon wood shops” in the back of Nashville’s historic May Hosiery building. He’d moved to Music City in 2010 to study at Belmont, but he quit three semesters in to focus on playing bass in rock band Better Off. Between tours, he’d grab odd jobs, including one at a local sawmill. “They were cutting slabs of wood for furniture makers,” Dalman remembers. “And so I kind of got really interested in trees and slabbing out trees, then furniture.” Before long, he was renting a bench at Nashville makerspace Fort Houston so he could design and build warm industrial pieces of his own — mostly organic slabs set on modern metal frames.