BRADY FLANIGANStaff Writer

Turn off North Jackson Street and head down West Lincoln Street. Wander by the Chamber of Commerce’s stony facade. Just this once, pass through the smell of pastrami and sourdough leaking from the City Sandwich Company. Pass by the New York strip at One22West. Pass by London’s; resist the whiskey and cigarettes. Keep crawling down the street and cross the railroad tracks. Look both ways—avoid freight trains. Now you’re on the other side of the tracks. Now you’re on East Lincoln Street. 

Keep moving with the town at your back. Let the hum of downtown fade into spread-out, quieter lots. Next door to Emil’s Bistro, there’ll be a neoclassical house with a wraparound porch—rising from the street on a row of white Doric columns. This little relic is The Grand Lux Inn, and after being purchased in December of ‘24 by Adam and Lauren Brock, it’s under new management.  

212. E. Lincoln St. is a place with 120 years of life painted over its walls. Thought to have been constructed in 1905, the Grand Lux Inn hasn’t always been the Grand Lux Inn. In many ways its origin is as obscure as its destiny, but Adam and Lauren own some pieces of its shattered porcelain story.

In a former life, the home functioned as a doctor’s clinic. Sitting in the front room beside a split fireplace, Adam said, “we actually had a guest that was here a couple weeks ago, and he said ‘we used to sneak into this place at night when it was a clinic and play with the stethoscopes and stuff like that.’ It was super interesting. One example of somebody having a connection to what this inn was in a previous life.” 

Later the building may have been converted into an antique store and its cabinets of quinine and scalpels traded out for Coke bottles and milk-glass tea sets. “My mom said ‘I think it was an antique store for a while before it was this,’” Adam recalled. “I think somebody at the paper told me that, actually.” It’s a story that moves in and out of focus like a near-sighted boy’s first eye exam—one that probably happened in the same living room.

Besides 212. E. Lincoln Street’s hazy history, the Grand Lux Inn wears mysteries all over like tattoos. The guest rooms—each with its own name, the Hunt Room, the Carlisle Room, the Georgia Room, the Chezy, and the Norfolk—have stories hidden in their labels. “Those were done by the Martins, I think,” Lauren said, referring to the owners of Emil’s Bistro next door. “We’d like to figure out the history of why they named each one.”

Even the bricks keep secrets. Etched in two panes of glass on the fireplace are the names “Gibbs” and “Thoma,” likely a link to the house’s early owners, but it’s a story unknown to Adam and Lauren. “I know I grew up with Thomas,” Adam said. “I don’t know what they’re up to these days, but I would imagine there’s only one Thoma family.”

Adam grew up in Tullahoma, just a few blocks over the Grand Lux, in the shadow of the Presbyterian Church he attended every Sunday. “A little bit ironic that we ended up buying this,” he laughed. Eventually life pulled him away to Chattanooga, where he met Lauren, and they built a life together from nails and two-by-fours as young property entrepreneurs.       

In the fall of 2023, their daughter was born, and the ground beneath them shifted. Maverick’s arrival pulled them back to Tullahoma, to family, to the same old soil. “We were looking for a new direction,” Lauren said. That direction led them first to Winchester, but the Grand Lux Inn sat waiting, old bones full of stories. Lauren and Adam saw it and couldn’t forget. It wasn’t anything they planned for. “The timing was just right,” Lauren said. 

The previous owner had moved to Tulsa and was ready to sell the inn. But he didn’t want the property to go the way of much of Tullahoma’s history—stripped, autopsied, and buried beneath commercial real estate. “He just really didn’t want to see this place go to a corporate style thing. A lot of people wanted to come in and rejig the whole place. I guess in his mind, they wanted to extract the character of the place in order to run it more efficiently and make a buck,” Adam said. The Brocks’ connection to Tullahoma helped shift the scales in their favor. 

Under Adam and Lauren’s care, new daisies have been sprouting from the Grand Lux Inn’s veteran floorboards. Behind the main house are two efficiency apartments, rented full time by Vanderbilt University for nurses and doctors doing stints at Vanderbilt Tullahoma-Harton Hospital. “We’ve got a contract with Vanderbilt,” Lauren said. “Their staff come and go as they need. It’s nice having that kind of steady presence.”

But it’s not just MDs and RNs occupying the Grand Lux Inn. Bonnaroo lingers like a dust cloud on the horizon, and the inn is already fully booked by ‘Roovians looking for a little more charm and a little less dust than the farm. Beyond that, Adam and Lauren want the Grand Lux Inn to become more than a hitching post for boutique travelers.

“I’m thinking about doing a spring music thing,” Adam said. “You know, like house concert type things. We want to have fun with this place, and being creative is part of who we are as people. I think that this is kind of a blank canvas in a lot of ways. It doesn’t just have to be a hotel.”

It’s already shown what it can be. Before Adam and Lauren took over, families booked the entire inn for Thanksgiving weekends, sparing their own kitchens from chaos and filling the dining room with the cadence of clacking china. Adam and Lauren see those moments as a glimpse of what the inn can become. “We want to have fun with this place,” Lauren said, her smile unfurling like a flower. For her, the opportunities start with hosting her book club in the living room. She pictures the space swollen with discussion and the rustling pulp paper—a room where ideas stretch their legs. It’s the kind of gathering that feels right for a place like this—a little gathering spot for new stories to take root in old walls.

212 E. Lincoln St. is a home built from time—where days are stacked like bricks ascending towards the future. When Lauren and Adam found it waiting there, it was holding its years tight, clinging to its stories for fear they might be forgotten, or worse, erased. The wraparound porch and the white Doric columns watched as they came and went, as they worked, as guests booked days out, as they dreamed aloud about weddings and concerts, more Thanksgivings in the dining room, more snow on the roof. And the house listened, creaking, breathing, stretching towards what it might become, knowing the Brocks are caring for it—stitching it into a new quilt in Tullahoma’s life.