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A DJ in a booth leading a crowd of people ancing in a dark room lit with fluorescent lights.

Night We Met Opens Tonight. Welcome to the Miami-fication of Nashville.

The house nightclub has taken over the former 12th & Porter building in the Gulch

by Jackie Gutierrez-Jones
House music is the focus at Night We Met.
| Night We Met
Jackie Gutierrez-Jones is the former editor of Eater Nashville. She has over a decade of experience writing, editing, and leading content teams in the food, drink, travel, and tech space.

Fresh off the heels of Miami’s Ultra Music Festival, the house music nightclub Night We Met is set to open its doors tonight, giving Nashville its very own dose of pulsing house beats and jam-packed dance floors. The new club, which features Kyle Watson and Lux Velour in its grand opening lineup, has taken over the former 12th & Porter building in the Gulch.

Backing the venture are Jim and Allison Knight, parents of Night We Met’s head of music curation and talent buyer Austin Knight. The Knights have been a staple in Nashville’s electronic music scene through their ownership of the Deep Tropics: Music, Art, and Style Festival, an electronic dance festival in Nashville. Austin Knight furthered that involvement through his role at production company Full Circle Presents and its popular Decompress parties.

A picture of a side profile of a man.
Night We Met’s Austin Knight.
Night We Met
One of the art installations at Night We Met.
Night We Met

Those parties, which launched in 2019, helped establish a foundation for the house music community with consistent programming, shares Knight. “Through these parties, we’ve been able to tap into a lot of talented local DJs and producers that have either been living here or moved here who never had an outlet or scene to play in,” says Knight. “The strength of the local scene, DJs, producers, and the growing house music scene is how we arrived at opening Night We Met.”

The idea behind the name was inspired by “Day We Met,” an electronic cut by Netherlands artist Fatima Yamaha. Knight was initially inspired to use the name and its inverse (“Night We Met”) for a party idea, but the event never came to fruition, paving the way for a potentially bigger purpose — Nashville’s first house nightclub. “Night We Met evokes a sentiment of memory and nostalgia. Some of the best nights out I’ve had are because of the people I’ve been with or met for the first time,” says Knight. “It made sense to name the club after that feeling.”

The club itself is split into two venues: the Vera Lounge and the Club Room, both outfitted with Void Acoustic Sound Systems and art installations (including a wrought iron metal face behind the DJ booth by Nimrod Messeg and a bronze amethyst torso sculpture by James Lomax). The lounge will primarily invite conversation and community with lower-tempo sounds in the backdrop. Its antithesis: the Club Room, where the main dance floor and frenetic beats commingle in a high-energy space.

A dark room lit by blue fluorescent lights with a DJ booth in the middle that reads “Night We Met”
The Club Room at Night We Met
Night We Met

“We are going to be able to get very creative with the DJs we bring in and having two rooms gives us the flexibility to diversify the night musically,” Knight says.

Night We Met will follow in the eco-conscious footsteps of the Deep Tropics festival, featuring a zero-waste program that includes composting, recycling, and no single-use plastics. The club’s head of sustainability, Joel Atchison, says that it will work with three third parties to measure its waste and carbon footprint with Green Disco Group — a business that offers customizable climate programs for the music industry — leading the data collection efforts to help them track and measure success.

The club will also implement a sustainable cocktail program led by mixologists Owen Gibler (Roze Pony, Employees Only) and Harrison Drost. The duo is featuring their twists on espresso martinis, Palomas, and Old Fashioneds using kegged cocktails for efficiency and consistency for 25 percent of the menu. Their commitment extends beyond flavor, however — as part of the sustainability aspect, the cocktail program will utilize as much of its ingredients as possible. Gibler also notes that plenty of cocktails will be served traditionally, but much of their focus has been on minimizing and eliminating waste by identifying crossovers between ingredients in all types of drinks.

An espresso martini next to a paloma situated on a glossy black surface
Two of the cocktails being offered at Night We Met.
Night We Met
A hand pouring a brown liquid from a shaker into a martini glass.
The club will serve both traditional and kegged cocktails.
Night We Met

“A single lime ends up in many drinks. The lime is first peeled and the peel is used to make a cordial, which is shaken with spirits to make a drink,” Gibler says. “The peeled lime is then juiced or sliced. The juice can be used immediately for call drinks, frozen for later, or clarified for kegged cocktails. The sliced fruit is dehydrated for garnish. Anything left over is composted.”

Ultimately, Knight hopes to change the house music landscape in Nashville. “Night We Met gives us the freedom to further develop the dance music scene in the South while highlighting local, national, and global DJs and producers in a unique space, in a unique city. It provides a real home for house music,” he says.