Taylor Swift's Nashville House and Her Nashville Hangouts

Taylor Swift owns 2 places in the Nashville area, and she bought the first one at 20. It is a penthouse in the Adelicia, the tower that anchors Midtown between Music Row and Vanderbilt, and it was the first home she paid for with her own money. The second arrived 2 years later: a walled estate in Forest Hills that already had a name when she got there.

The Adelicia runs 18 stories. Corner Realty Partners developed it and Brasfield & Gorrie built it, and the contractor's own project record describes 186 condominiums that start as brownstone-style townhouses at street level and finish as penthouses on the top 2 floors, over 5 levels of parking. Swift took the top of that stack in 2009.

What she did next is the part that stuck. Rolling Stone toured the unit in 2012 and found that the place had been an ultramodern bachelor pad before her, and that she had spent 18 months undoing it. A koi pond sits under a wrought-metal spiral staircase. A human-sized birdcage she sketched herself faces the windows. A framed photo of the night Kanye West took her microphone at the 2009 VMAs hangs over the fireplace. “It’s what the inside of my brain looks like,” she told the magazine.

The unit number and the street number stay behind the ropes, where they belong. The building, the block, the map pin, and the full property breakdown sit on Taylor Swift's Nashville penthouse profile.

The block she bought into

Music Row starts a few blocks east of the tower. Owen and Harold Bradley opened their Quonset Hut studio there in 1954, RCA answered with Studio B in 1957, and every label Swift walked into as a teenager had an address inside that grid. Buying at 20 in Midtown was not a random pin on a map. It put her a walk from the industry that had signed her.

The ground floor of her own building carried a restaurant for a while. Strategic Hospitality opened Le Sel there in October 2015 and closed it on May 19, 2019, which is worth saying plainly because the original version of this page told readers to go have brunch downstairs from Taylor Swift. That door has been shut for years.

The hangouts, in her own words

Swift gave the definitive list herself. In a Time interview published on March 7, 2014, she walked Alex Rogers through the places she goes.

Radnor Lake came first. “There’s a park called Radnor Lake,” she said, and added that she had “had some of my best days walking there with my dad.” The lake is not natural. The Louisville and Nashville Railroad dammed Otter Creek around 1910 and let gravity carry the water almost 5 miles downhill to its steam engines. The Tennessee Ornithological Society talked the railroad into declaring the grounds a wildlife preserve in the 1920s, and after the steam era ended the land went up for development. The state bought 747 acres in August 1973 and made it Tennessee's first State Natural Area. It is roughly 1,100 acres now, with about 7 miles of foot trails and no room for anything faster.

Coffee was next. “A huge priority for me is having a good coffee place to go and hang out,” she told Time. “Fido has such a great atmosphere.” Fido is in Hillsboro Village, in a storefront that sold puppies and parakeets for half a century before Bob Bernstein took it over in 1996. Jones Pet Shop left its neon sign behind, the sign still hangs above the door, and the cafe is named after it. There is now an end date on that sign: Bernstein said in the fall of 2025 that he would not renew at market rate on a 100-year-old building, and Fido closes on June 1, 2028. He put a countdown in the window rather than let it end quietly.

Then the room that started everything. “I love driving past the Bluebird Cafe, because that’s where I played the acoustic show that ended up getting me a record deal,” she said. Amy Kurland opened the Bluebird in a Green Hills strip mall in June 1982 and ran it as a lunch spot by day and a listening room by night. Writers' nights began in 1984, the first in-the-round show followed in March 1985, and a teenage Swift played one of those nights in front of Scott Borchetta, who signed her to Big Machine. She came back on April 1, 2018 for a surprise set filmed for the venue's 35th anniversary documentary.

For shopping and dinner she named 12 South and East Nashville, and for a wander she named Hillsboro Village, which is the same 2 blocks Fido sits on. The legacy version of this page also put Green Hills, the Gulch, and Broadway on her list. Those are neighborhoods near her building rather than places she has ever named, so read them as geography. The Bluebird itself sits in Green Hills, the same neighborhood as the Mall at Green Hills.

The places Nashville named back

The traffic runs both directions. Swift pledged $500,000 to Tennessee flood relief in May 2010, the spring after she bought in Midtown. In 2012 she pledged $4M to the Country Music Hall of Fame, the largest single gift an artist had made to the museum in its first 46 years, and the Taylor Swift Education Center opened there on October 12, 2013 with classrooms, a learning lab, and a children's gallery.

In May 2023, before 3 Eras Tour nights at Nissan Stadium, the city put a bench in Centennial Park with a plaque that reads “For Taylor Swift. A bench for you to read on at Centennial Park.” It answers a line in “invisible string” about the color of the grass where she used to read at Centennial. And when The Life of a Showgirl landed in October 2025, Kim Radford painted her on the side of Grimey's in East Nashville while the Belcourt ran screenings up in Hillsboro Village.

The estate in Forest Hills

Her second Tennessee house came in June 2011, and its history is older and better documented than the penthouse's. The Davidson County assessor dates the main house to 1964 and records a one-story frame house on 5.7 acres inside the Forest Hills tax district. Metro's address file gives the barns on the property their own street numbers, labeled front barn and rear barn, which is how a single parcel ends up published under 2 different addresses.

Before Swift it was Northumberland, and it belonged to Guilford Dudley Jr. and his wife Jane. Dudley ran Life and Casualty Insurance, served as Nixon's ambassador to Denmark, and is the reason the 31-floor L&C Tower went up downtown in 1957. Jane founded the Swan Ball in 1963 to raise money for Cheekwood, and it is still the city's ranking social night of the year. Jane sold the estate in 2004 to Luke Lewis, who ran Universal Music's Nashville labels, and the assessor's sales history shows no transfer between his purchase and Swift's, so Lewis held it right up until she took it. Taylor Swift's Forest Hills estate carries the parcel record and the map pin.

The rest of the portfolio

Outside Tennessee, the Beverly Hills house that matters is the Samuel Goldwyn Estate, which she bought in 2015 and restored toward its original 1930s condition. In January 2017 she went to the city seeking landmark designation so the house would stay preserved, an unusual move for an owner who could have gutted it instead. Her earlier and smaller Beverly Hills place, taken on in 2011, was gone by 2018.

In Watch Hill, Rhode Island, she bought Holiday House in 2013. It was built between 1929 and 1930 and later belonged to Rebekah Harkness, the Standard Oil heiress who turned the grounds into a summer camp for the Joffrey Ballet in 1962. Swift heard the story from the agent walking her through the rooms and wrote “the last great american dynasty” about Harkness on folklore in 2020, which makes it the only house on this list that produced a song about its previous owner.

New York holds a Tribeca penthouse she bought from Peter Jackson in 2014. The West Village townhouse people still associate with her was never hers to sell. It was a rental at $40,000 a month while the Tribeca place was being rebuilt.

Nashville is the one that kept her. The penthouse she bought at 20 is still hers, and so is the estate, and the coffee shop she named in 2014 has a clock on the wall counting down to 2028.