Today we’d like to introduce you to Valeria Lopez.
Hi Valeria, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
My journey has always been rooted in entrepreneurship, creativity, community, and service. I’ve always had a passion for creating experiences that bring people together, while also finding ways to make an impact in the community.
A defining chapter in my journey came during COVID-19. Like so many entrepreneurs, we were faced with uncertainty and had to rethink what it meant to operate, survive, and continue serving others. During that time, we truly began to understand what it meant to be essential.
Our desire to remain connected to and continue serving our community ultimately led us into the restaurant industry. Opening our restaurants wasn’t simply about expanding into another business—it gave us an opportunity to continue serving people through food, hospitality, employment, and community.
It was also during this time that I birthed Privy: The All White Pop-Up.
Privy became another expression of something that has always been important to me: bringing people together. After experiencing a time when people had been separated from one another, I wanted to create an experience centered around connection, culture, music, food, celebration, and community.
What began as a vision continued to grow and evolve, just as I did as an entrepreneur.
Over the years, my journey has expanded into restaurants, event venues, catering, event design, entertainment, festivals, and nonprofit and community initiatives. None of it has happened in a perfectly straight line. There have been challenges, financial risks, setbacks, pivots, and plenty of lessons along the way. But each chapter has helped shape the next.
Today, I wear many hats—business owner, restaurateur, event professional, creative, nonprofit leader, wife, mother, and mentor—but I don’t see these as separate worlds. They are all connected by the same purpose: serving people, creating opportunities, and building experiences that bring our community together.
COVID was an incredibly difficult time, but it also became a defining period in my entrepreneurial story. It pushed me to think differently, create differently, and find new ways to serve.
I’m proud of how far this journey has taken me, but I still feel like I’m just getting started.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
It definitely has not been a smooth road. Owning a restaurant is never easy, and there was a time when the restaurant was truly one of the greatest joys of my life. But entrepreneurship doesn’t happen separately from life, and over the last several years, life has changed me.
From 2023 into 2024, within roughly a six-month period, I experienced an unimaginable amount of loss. I lost my goddaughter, my sister, my stepmother, and my nephew. Losing four people I loved in such a short period of time took a tremendous toll on me emotionally and spiritually.
Two of those loved ones had also worked alongside us in the restaurant. Suddenly, spaces that once represented joy, family, and togetherness felt different. I sometimes wonder if all of that loss softened some of my drive—not my love for what I’ve created or my desire to succeed, but that relentless drive to always push through, no matter what.
Eventually, we reduced our restaurant operating days and things slowed down. I had to learn something that can be especially difficult for an entrepreneur: slowing down doesn’t always mean you’re giving up. Sometimes you’re simply trying to heal while still keeping everything together.
Privy brought another major challenge. In 2025, I lost a vital sponsor at a critical time, making an already expensive event even more difficult to produce. We still delivered Privy that year, but I felt like I literally carried the event on my back.
Privy brings approximately 4,500 people together and costs around $150,000 to produce. What people see is an incredible crowd dressed in white, celebrating and enjoying Nashville. What they don’t always see is the financial responsibility, planning, community work, and purpose behind that experience.
Privy is much more than a party.
It recognizes individuals making a difference in underserved communities and provides $500 book scholarships to students attending Tennessee-based colleges—many of which I have personally funded. It also brings thousands of people into Nashville to eat, stay, shop, celebrate, and experience our city and community.
One of the struggles has been finding sponsors who understand those elements of Privy rather than seeing only the celebration. Producing something of that magnitude without adequate sponsorship simply isn’t sustainable.
That’s why I made the difficult decision to take 2026 off from Privy. This isn’t about walking away from what I’ve built. It’s about giving myself and the event room to breathe, restructure, and develop partnerships that can help sustain it.
Our goal is to return in 2027 stronger, with new sponsorship relationships and a renewed vision for Privy as a premier end-of-summer Nashville experience—one that attracts people from neighboring cities and from across the country to experience Nashville, our culture, and our community in its totality.
The road has taught me that resilience doesn’t always look like pushing harder. Sometimes resilience is surviving the season, allowing yourself to heal, and having the courage to rebuild differently.
That’s the season I’m in now. I’m not finished. I’m healing, rebuilding, and preparing for what’s next.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I consider myself a creative entrepreneur and experience curator. My creativity doesn’t live in one particular space. It shows up through food, hospitality, event production, design, music, culture, and most importantly, the way I make people feel when they enter something I’ve created.
It’s actually hard for me to say whether I’m more known for Privy: The All White Pop-Up or Suite Twelve25, which became one of Nashville’s hottest brunch destinations after we opened following the pandemic.
Suite Twelve25 really took off organically and became a viral place to visit. But what made it special wasn’t just the food. I intentionally created a space with tourism, girls’ trips, birthdays, celebrations, and the Nashville visitor experience in mind. I wanted people to walk through the doors and immediately feel like they had arrived somewhere they wanted to stay.
The aesthetics mattered. The music mattered. The service mattered. The cocktails mattered. And, of course, the food mattered—from our comfort dishes to what I will proudly put up against anybody: our chicken and waffles.
Suite Twelve25 represents my approach to creativity. You can come in, lounge, kick back, have a beautifully curated cocktail, eat great food, celebrate something—or nothing at all—and simply enjoy the vibe.
Then there’s Privy, which shows another side of that same creativity on a much larger scale. Privy has grown into an experience attracting approximately 4,500 people, combining music, fashion, food, entertainment, culture, community recognition, and philanthropy. It has become an end-of-summer destination that draws people to Nashville from surrounding cities and beyond.
So when people truly know me and know the spaces and experiences I’ve created, I think the creativity I bring to spaces is what I’m most known for—from the food, to the aesthetics, to the vibe.
I don’t just decorate a room or put together an event. I think about the entire experience. What do you see when you walk in? What are you eating? What are you drinking? What music is playing? How does the room make you feel? And what are you going to tell somebody about it when you leave?
That’s where my creativity lives.
I’m most proud that I’ve been able to turn ideas in my head into experiences that people genuinely connect with. Whether it’s an intimate celebration, a restaurant filled with birthday parties and girls’ trips, or thousands of people dressed in white coming together for Privy, there’s a piece of my creativity in every detail.
What sets me apart is that I don’t just create spaces—I create a vibe, a feeling, and a memory.
For me, that’s the art.
Alright, so to wrap up, is there anything else you’d like to share with us?
There are a few parts of my story that I would never want to leave out, because while people may know me for the restaurants, events, and spaces I’ve created, service has always been at the foundation of who I am.
From 2011 through 2022, I served as an Executive Director working with the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP), while our nonprofit, Essential Needs, worked to help reduce hunger throughout the state of Tennessee. For more than a decade, much of my life centered around something very basic but incredibly important—making sure people had access to food.
That work changed the way I view entrepreneurship. When you’ve seen firsthand what food insecurity looks like, success becomes about more than what you can build for yourself. I’ve always believed that whatever I create should, in some way, create access or opportunity for someone else.
That same philosophy is behind Chandelier Event Space.
In 2023, my husband and I took on a building in Nashville’s Buchanan Arts District that has a very personal connection to my family. When I was growing up, that building once belonged to my uncle, who operated the only Black-owned dry cleaners in the area. Years later, my husband and I became the owners of Chandelier Event Space in that same building.
There’s something very special about returning to a place that was part of my childhood and my family’s history and being able to reimagine it for another generation of the community.
With Chandelier, I wanted to make beautiful celebrations more accessible. Everyone deserves to celebrate life’s important moments, but not everyone can afford to rent a venue and then spend thousands more on a decorator, planner, and everything else required to transform it.
So I created Chandelier to already feel special when you walk through the door. I wanted someone to be able to have a birthday, wedding, anniversary, repast, baby shower, or other milestone and feel just as grand without having to carry the financial burden of creating that feeling from scratch.
I also believe it’s important to talk about the experiences that haven’t gone exactly as planned.
One of my most difficult recent lessons came through the inaugural Black Yacht WKND. That experience taught me that your marketing can be both a blessing and a curse.
We marketed Black Yacht WKND aggressively because we wanted to create excitement and introduce Nashville to a new destination experience. Unfortunately, that marketing created a perception that hundreds of thousands of people were expected to descend upon an area that couldn’t accommodate those kinds of numbers.
That was never what the event was designed to be.
But once that perception took hold, we faced restrictions and circumstances that were beyond our control before we really had the opportunity to deliver the event as it was intended. I was left carrying the impact of an experience that, in my opinion, never had the opportunity to fully become what we created it to be.
I won’t pretend that didn’t hurt. It did, and I have felt the effects of the misconceptions surrounding that event beyond that weekend.
But I’ve also chosen to learn from it.
As creatives, we’re constantly trying to figure out how to get people to pay attention. Black Yacht WKND taught me that when you finally get that attention, you also have to think about how it may be interpreted by people outside of your intended audience. Moving forward, I understand even more clearly the importance of making sure city officials, community stakeholders, public safety partners, and others understand the projected attendance, logistics, footprint, and intention behind an event—not simply the excitement created by its marketing.
I’ve had wins, and I’ve had losses. I’ve experienced tremendous growth and tremendous grief. I’ve created experiences that have attracted thousands of people, and I’ve also had ideas that taught me some very expensive lessons.
But when I step back and look at the entire journey, I see a common thread.
Whether I was working to reduce hunger throughout Tennessee, creating restaurants where people could gather, providing book scholarships through Privy, creating an affordable venue through Chandelier, or producing experiences designed to bring people to Nashville, my work has always been about people.
I hope when people tell my story, they don’t measure it only by how many businesses I’ve owned, how many people attended an event, or how beautiful a space looked.
I hope they measure it by how many people we served, how many people we brought together, how many people we celebrated, and how many people had access to something because we decided to create it.
I’ve learned that being a creative entrepreneur isn’t about getting everything right. It’s about having enough vision to create something that didn’t exist before, enough humility to learn when something doesn’t work, and enough resilience to continue evolving.
After everything I’ve experienced personally and professionally over these last several years, I’m entering this next chapter differently. I’m giving myself permission to slow down when necessary, to be more intentional about what I carry, and to make sure the things I create are sustainable—not only for the community, but for me.
I’m still creating. I’m still serving. I’m still learning. And I’m definitely not finished.
Pricing:
- Chandelier Event space rentals starting at $600
- Suite Twelve25 private dinner parties starting at $750
- Chandelier Event Planning/ Weddings starting at $4000
- Suite Twelve25 Catering Services for small or large groups
Contact Info:
- Website: https://Suite1225nash.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/suite_twelve25/
- Facebook: Suite Twelve25 Urban Hang Suite & Bistro
