Tour Peter Frampton’s Peaceful and Accessible Tennessee Home

Not long after Peter Frampton settled in downtown Nashville in 2011, his adopted neighborhood slowly yet surely morphed into the bachelorette-party capital of America. The legendary rock musician, who just marked his 60th year of touring, is no stranger to celebratory atmospheres. (His latest Never Ever Say Never tour kicked off on March 3 in Greensboro, North Carolina.) But when Frampton kept close to home during the pandemic, “the huge double-decker buses…just got so noisy from Thursday through Sunday.”

Frampton readied to relocate to a more peaceful condo nearby, until a new companion convinced him otherwise. That would be Bigsby, the service dog who for the last several years has supported Frampton as he adapts to life with inclusion body myositis (IBM). “I had decided to move, but in the interim I got Bigsby and I realized that living in an apartment wasn’t going to be the best thing,” he recalls. Extra confirmation of that hunch came with a visit to the home of friend and interior designer Robin Rains in a bucolic part of Nashville: “Robin has land and Bigsby was just beside himself. I saw him running free and thought, Oh my god, I’ve got to move. I needed a backyard, I wanted my privacy.” Rains had done work for Frampton previously, and without hesitation he commissioned her eponymous design studio to collaborate on this prospective project. “Peter very much has his card deck of people he works with, and he goes back to them,” Rains says of the trust she and Frampton have in one another.

Navigating a competitive marketplace, Frampton ultimately found a newly constructed house not far from Rains. The residence suited Bigsby, and it was big enough to accommodate visits from Frampton’s human family, which in December expanded to include a second grandchild. It just required tailoring to his specific needs and point of view. “Any time you work with a spec house, you’re really trying to make the space unique and memorable,” Rains says of the assignment, on which she was assisted by her in-house designer Jenna Miller.

Rains peeled back the interior architecture before making a mark. “We eliminated things we deemed unnecessary to get to a cleaner aesthetic,” she says of the removal of existing trim and lighting. Wood planks and Venetian plaster were then applied to ceilings and walls, and the entry as well as multiple closet doors were replaced, to crystallize the property’s European farmhouse identity.

Simultaneously, Rains removed larger chunks of the house to accommodate Frampton’s IBM. He specifically feels symptoms most around the knees, as his guitar-licking digits have resisted the autoimmune disease. “Stairs are my worst enemy,” says the musician, “[so] obviously we put in an elevator.” Exercise is one of the few clinically proven ways of slowing and reducing disease activity, and the retrofitted lift takes Frampton to an upstairs gym where he works out six days each week; “Bigsby snoozes while I exercise,” he says. The remaining second-floor rooms encompass a two-bedroom apartment with an office, reserved for guests, which is largely decorated in the previous condo’s furnishings.

Because he planned to spend most of his day downstairs, Frampton asked Rains to focus her attention on a suite of ground-floor rooms that includes a music room and studio—the latter converted from a den—in addition to a primary bedroom, kitchen, and family room. In these spaces, Rains says, IBM informed design choices. “We needed to think about how easily [Frampton] could get up from a sofa, so we customized those to be a little bit taller without necessarily looking like it,” Rains cites as one example. “We also used vintage chairs, but only pieces with arms and tight seats, and we put the kitchen’s coffee station close to the family room because Peter’s coffee is important. Attention to daily living was something we had to keep in mind with everything.”

At the same time, Frampton wanted the renovation project to celebrate his family and personal style rather than merely accommodate his condition. “I didn’t think I had any specific taste, and don’t get me wrong, I knew nothing,” he prefaces. “But Robin told me that we think along the same lines, and she showed me what can be done and has taught me so much about design.” Rains isn’t quite so convinced of that narrative, however, noting that Frampton’s eye is as laser-focused on style as functionality. “Peter doesn’t like clutter; pieces need to be meaningful to him, and he wants to feel at rest at home,” the designer observes. Mission accomplished.

tour peter frampton’s peaceful and accessible tennessee home

Peter Frampton in his home.

While many of the possessions from Peter Frampton’s condo were moved to the second floor of his new house, the musician asked interior designer Robin Rains to give pride of place to his long-treasured Pablo Picasso portrait, which was shot at his La Californie villa by Irving Penn in 1957. Rains mounted the artwork over a custom iron bench upholstered in Holland & Sherry’s Patagonia mélange wool flannel.

In the family room, patio doors center on a fireplace topped by an abstract painting by Bernadette de Samois. A custom sofa facing an ebony coffee table from Clubcu, as well as a bouclé-clad seat and Emmitt Lounge Chair by Charleston Forge, completes the vignette.

Rains removed some kitchen cabinetry to create a more commodious dining area. Frampton uses the expansive table as a multifunctional surface for WFH duties which, in the case of the rock star, includes signing posters. Light by Roll & Hill and seating by Faustine Furniture.

Rains reused much of the spec house’s existing kitchen, and put Frampton’s stamp on the space by illuminating the island in Apparatus’s Cylinder Pendant lights.

Rains approached the primary bedroom in a similar fashion as the studio, using expanses of Weitzner’s Ritual fabric to transform the space into a cocoon with the push of a button. “That whole-wall treatment really blew me away,” Frampton exclaims.

In a secondary bedroom, a Marco Bed with a headboard by Oly sits beneath Lawson-Fenning’s Alta Brass Dome luminaire. The flanking sconces were custom made by the Urban Electric Co.

In the music room, an oil-on-canvas triptych of Japanese martial artists hangs above a mohair-upholstered Wave Sofa by Baker. The chandelier, Wareco’s O Branch V Curved, features lamps shaded in ostrich eggs. Local artisans from Olympia Paint Design were responsible for plastering walls in multiple rooms.

“I’ve lived in New York and Los Angeles, where people meet up and say, ‘We must get together and jam.’ Here, you do,” Frampton says of Nashville’s music community. At Frampton’s home, these friends and colleagues may find themselves in the studio that Rains outfitted with an artfully worn vintage rug from Eliko Rugs by David Ariel and curtains sourced from James Dunlop Textiles, which visually and acoustically soften the jam sessions.

“He was so excited by his porch,” Rains says of indoor-outdoor space, which features Palecek lounge chairs, a Lee Industries outdoor sofa, multiple antiques, and a wall-mounted sculpture by husband-and-wife artists Cor Oda and Kit King. “It was important to create artistry and uniqueness to reflect Peter’s anticipation of dining and playing guitar there, but he also uses the space to stash his grandchild’s toys and let Bigsby lay on the stone.”

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