Nashville Home Studios Win Fight Against City Restrictions

Nashville, TN (August 7, 2025)—A Tennessee appeals court has struck down restrictions imposed by the city of Nashville on home-based recording studios, marking the end—barring another appeal—of a decade-long legal battle.

In late 2017, Elijah “Lij” Shaw, owner and operator of the Toy Box Studio in East Nashville, filed a lawsuit against the Nashville Metro Council’s ban on business owners receiving any clients in their homes. He was joined in the suit by Nashville hair stylist Pat Raynor. The pair were represented by the Institute for Justice (IJ) and the Beacon Center of Tennessee.

In a Facebook post this week, Shaw wrote: “Back in 2015, I got a cease [and] desist from the city for having a recording studio and ten years later in 2025, that cease and desist is null and void! We were able to push through new legislation to allow home studios in 2020, but they still put unfair restrictions on [us] and we were able to show that we should be treated equally. This is a huge win for me and for the music community as a whole in Nashville. I know so many people whose livelihood is dependent on having a successful home studio.”

In 1998, Metro passed, without public debate, a residential zoning ordinance that made it illegal for home businesses to serve clients on the property. The ordinance imposed steep fines and potential imprisonment if any customers visited a home business such as a recording studio, hair stylist or other enterprise.

In its analysis of Nashville business records in 2017, IJ discovered some exemptions: “The zoning code allows home-based daycares to serve up to 12 clients a day on the property. People who live in historic homes are also allowed to use their homes up to several times a week for special events, such as wedding receptions and catered dinners.”

Shaw and Raynor—a semi-retired widow who had undertaken an expensive renovation to her garage to establish a one-chair hair salon with a valid Tennessee cosmetology license—argued that the visitor restrictions were being applied unequally to their businesses in their suit. In response, Nashville permitted them to have up to six visits a day but imposed other requirements that Shaw and Raynor considered “invasive and burdensome” and also not being applied to certain other home businesses.

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The appeals court this week unanimously agreed that Nashville Metro had not offered good reasons for favoring some home business over others.

In 2022, the lawsuit went up to the Tennessee Supreme Court, which overturned a previous dismissal of the unequal treatment case by a lower court. The city could still appeal this latest decision to the state supreme court.