On Inheritance

Notes on women and things passed down.

After I had my son, my creative brain lit on fire. Ideas came faster than I could articulate them. Entire worlds. Brands that felt less like businesses and more like alternate realities I could briefly access.

I think it was my brain’s awkward attempt at reassurance. A way of saying: you are still yourself. Maybe even more yourself now.

Out of that time came the Abandoned Building Series. See; Part One. Part Two. A creative prompt : What if we imagined possibility into places left behind?

Part love letter to the forgotten architecture of Nashville. Part exploration of the spaces and brands I wish existed inside them.

Welcome to Part Three.

I’m moving the series to Substack because it deserves a more permanent home, especially as the website undergoes a long overdue rebrand and renovation of its own.

We went a week without reliable laundry in the new house. You adapt. And you think, more than is probably reasonable, about laundromats. I’ve never actually used one, which probably tells you everything about my tendency to romanticize ordinary life.

And somewhere in the middle of that spiral, I found traces of Madeline. Story goes, that in 2015, Cleveland Park said goodbye to the laundry cafe on the corner of Meridian and Douglas. I’d never heard of it until recently, but once I did, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I found fragments of proof online: an abandoned Yelp page, a few blurry photos, comments from people who seemed oddly emotional about a laundromat closing.

And then I started wondering what might have been going on inside that building for the last decade.

The idea split open.

Here is what I think happened - not a speakeasy exactly. Something softer. Stranger. More feminine.

Belladonna. A nightly feminine underground, operating out of a former laundromat on Douglas Ave.

The kind of place that has no business existing and has always existed, in one form or another where women found each other. Like you stumbled into an institution women built quietly because they needed somewhere to put their intelligence, grief, appetite, beauty, rage, intuition, and humor. All of it - together. At a table. After dark.

Inside, women learn the things nobody formally teaches us.

301 DOUGLAS AVE — CLEVELAND PARK — NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE

Someone told you about it.

That’s the only way this works. There’s no signage. No website. No Instagram. The windows stay dim. Most people walk past it without noticing. Most people are supposed to.

You know it exists because a woman you trust told you to look for the woman rolling pasta outside under a string of dim lights - not an aesthetic choice, she loves fresh air, and the pasta genuinely needs rolling. If you find her, she may or may not invite you in.

Inside, the feeling of luxury lives in the atmosphere more than the objects - built slowly over time, layer by layer. A room becomes seductive the same way a woman does.

The walls are the kind of deep plaster that absorbs sound and secrets. Every surface glows and the lighting is terrible in the most flattering way possible. Lamps and candles only - overhead lighting is forbidden.

Women arrive carrying various types of hunger that needs tending. Someone arriving straight from a date she intends to complain about beautifully. Someone else fresh off a flight. Silk dresses under trench coats. Gold jewelry. Some still smell faintly like their children’s shampoo. The elder women move through the room with a terrifying calm and conversations overlap and drift between generations at the long table that runs through the center of the building like a spine.

The kitchen behaves more like an inherited family system with women who rotate through it continuously. One cooking the pasta. Another charring citrus over the stove. Someone arriving and instinctively taking over the salad because her hands need something to do while she tells the story properly. Recipes exist, technically, but mostly in the bodies of the women making them. The food changes nightly depending on who showed up, what somebody’s grandmother used to make when things were bad, or what sounded good after the second bottle of wine. Measurements are vague, instincts are trusted, and every woman swears her version is the correct one. There’s always too much food and somehow never leftovers.

Toward the back, past the noise and heat of dinner, the building narrows into smaller rooms. There are velvet card and mahjong tables in the back room overseen by terrifyingly glamorous older women who will absolutely take your money and teach you something in the process. But the games themselves are beside the point - the real lesson is learning how to read a room. Restraint. Timing. Intuition. Emotional control. How to know when someone is bluffing. How to fold, and mean it.

There is a bar that stretches along the far wall that feels somewhere between an Italian pharmacy and your most glamorous aunt’s bathroom. The one with the interesting perfume bottles you weren’t supposed to touch. Cold spoons. Bitter tinctures. Rose water in a silver atomizer. Hand creams. Loose cigarettes. Heirloom jewelry on velvet perches not intended for anyone's ungrateful niece, left by women who came before. You take one thing. You leave one thing.

You can order a perfect martini, obviously. Extra cold, very dry, straight up, lemon twist cut paper thin - which is the right way, in my opinion.

But you can also ask for what you actually need..

Something fortifying.
Something clarifying.
Something for courage.
Something for after a bad date.
Something restorative after spending all day being needed by other people.

And somehow, between the martinis and the perfume and the women leaning against the marble counter talking quietly over melting ice, something else gets exchanged there too.

Not advice exactly, but something older than advice.

The particular intelligence that develops when women spend years studying each other closely. Who is lonely, who is pretending, who needs tending to, who is unraveling, and who is coming back to life after getting lost inside her own life. Nothing here is formally taught - it moves sideways and through proximity. Through a gesture at a table, or the way someone carries themselves. And suddenly you understand something about restraint, confidence, and desire without a single word being said. You may sit next to someone at the long table and by the end of the night you understand that she has survived something and come out the other side still hungry.

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The name felt right.

Belladonna - used throughout history by women medicinally, ceremonially, cosmetically. It was called dangerous by people who couldn't control it.

Medieval Italian women used the dilating drops cosmetically - a few drops in the eye and your pupils go dark and wide. The effect was considered irresistible.

Bella donna. Beautiful woman.

It was in the kits of midwives. In the hands of healers. Used ceremonially by women who understood threshold states - birth, death, fever, grief. The plant is mysterious and healing and beautiful all at once. It has always known something about the relationship between danger and vision, between beauty and power, between what is simply — ungovernable.

So does this place.

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Belladonna Philopsophy:

Never accept advice from unhappy women.
Bad energy clings to acrylic nails.
Your grandmother survived worse in better lipstick.
Women can sense hunger in each other.
Never chase anything that requires self-abandonment.
A nervous system needs beauty.
Keep your voice low and your standards unreasonable.
Appetite is holy.
Intuition is inherited.

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Nobody tells you that becoming a mother makes you ravenous for other women.

Not in a soft way. Not in a “it takes a village” way, but in a primal way. In the way you suddenly understand, with your whole body, that you were never supposed to do any of this alone. You begin craving proximity to women who have already survived the exact thing you’re living through. Women who can look at you once and understand the strange expansion of self without requiring explanation.

And maybe that’s really the whole point of Belladonna. Just women who know things.

Women who have lived long enough to become intuitive in that terrifying, cellular way. Women who can read a silence. Women who know when someone is lying because they’ve lied before too. Women who understand appetite. Reinvention. Grief. Seduction. Loneliness. Timing. Joy.

Belladonna is about the possibility that femininity exists as its own underground language. Built from beauty and appetite and intuition and emotional intelligence. Passed woman to woman, generation to generation.

And maybe, if you know where to look, it still does.

Come hungry.

How did you build a brand for a pretend secret society, you ask? Here is a glimpse into one of the directions I developed for this concept. More to come next week.

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Did I make a ShopMy with items I would imagine in this space? You bet your ass I did.

Come sit with us,

Lauren