6 minute read
MESA
There’s something special about this hospitality interiors crew MESA
BY NICOLE CHILDREY | PHOTOGRAPHY BY WILLIAM DESHAZER
Back home in rural Indiana, Jon Dalman’s job doesn’t sound all that special.
“I’ll talk to family or friends ... I’m like, ‘We build, like, booth seating or banquette seating,’ and they just stare at me,” he says, laughing. “And I remember, in smaller towns, it doesn’t matter. You’re just going to eat. You have some chipboard plastic laminate chair that you sit on and you eat the food and you leave. But here (in Nashville), it’s this immersive experience, and everyone’s trying to be different.”
Dalman’s not just building booths. As the owner of Mesa, he leads a team that, project to project, might fabricate nearly
every part of a hospitality interiors project, from seating to countertops, furnishings, ornamental metalwork and millwork — a specialty.
Since his business is in Nashville, Dalman gets the drive toward standing out. Mesa’s been making their own moves.
He and the team have contributed to some of Middle Tennessee’s most stylish spaces, from the industrial-cool Factory at Franklin to the refined omakase experience Sushi Bar in Nashville. And big projects keep coming in, including the high-end, Asian-inspired Experience ZuZu that’s in the works at the former Green Pheasant space downtown.
“We’ll do the trim package, the casework, the millwork, wall paneling. And then we meet the clients — which is my favorite thing — and they’ll come here for a shop tour and they’re like, ‘Oh, you also do tables?’ We’re like, ‘That’s like the heart of our company.”
Where Mesa stands out, in particular, is their in-house breadth, which allows architects and designers to keep the circle small and negotiations simple.
“We can get the scope from A to Z,” Dalman says. “We’ll do the trim package, the casework, the millwork, wall paneling. And then we meet the clients — which is my favorite thing — and they’ll come here for a shop tour and they’re like, ‘Oh, you also do tables?’ We’re like, ‘That’s like the heart of our company.’”
Back to the Heart of It
Out back around Mesa’s new shop — a former gun range in Ashland City — you’ll still find remnants of a defunct lumber yard. Dalman doesn’t get in the sawdust so much lately, but he spotted a stash of timber in the barn, and it brought him back to the heart of things.
Those boards are now aligned inside a gently curving metal frame — a big, bold, Dalman-designed meeting table that anchors Mesa’s “creative area.” Plastic sheeting and drywall dust hide it at the moment, and it’ll probably stay that way for another two, maybe three weeks. While the fabrication team completes banquette after banquette for ZuZu, contractors keep mudding walls for Mesa’s own busy build-out.
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
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.
“They were cutting slabs of wood for furniture makers, and so I kind of got really interested in trees and slabbing out trees, then furniture.”
Initially, Dalman approached his fledgling business like another odd job. He tackled projects when Better Off was off the road. He got married, moved into a continent-wandering camper van and stopped back in Nashville from time to time to finish another table.
His focus was split, but Dalman’s next-bench neighbors, Jeff Estes and Nate Akey, stayed in growth mode, establishing their Five String Furniture brand as a go-to name in Nashville.
In 2018, disparate paths aligned.
“I came back and had a coffee with Jeff, and he’s like, ‘Hey, my partner, Nate, left the company and I’m burning out,’” Dalman remembers. “‘Is there any chance?’”
Dalman and former business partner Kyle Miller bought Five String, retooled and reshaped the business, and a year later, renamed it Mesa (which means “table” in Spanish, though they mostly chose the word because they felt like it had household-name potential).
Now, mid-buildout on a home base that’s engineered for evolution, Dalman is laser-focused on Mesa and “thirsty to scale.” And in Music City, folks get just how special their work is.
Katie Vance, partner and chief creative officer at leading Nashville interiors, architecture and construction firm Powell, collaborates with the Mesa crew on all kinds of projects, large and small. She knows a knack when she sees one.
“They are a go-to when it comes to booths and banquettes,” Vance says. NI
