Japanese Fusion

Commune Design draws inspiration from the Land of the Rising Sun for a record lounge in Nashville

- MAYER RUS

Nashville seems an unlikely place to discover anything even remotely akin to a Japanese kissa bar. A kissa—or, more traditionally, a jazz kissa—is a type of café that initially sprang up in Japan in the 1920s as a communal place for people to drink, socialize, and listen to vinyl records. “They’re typically very intimate, casual, DIY spaces, sort of cobbled together,” explains Roman Alonso of the AD100 firm Commune Design, which recently completed work on 888, a combination kissa and sushi restaurant improbably tucked in the base of the JW Marriott Nashville hotel tower.