Green Hills is an affluent neighborhood five miles south of downtown Nashville, built primarily around mid-20th century ranch houses on large lots, anchored by Tennessee’s best shopping mall, and home to the Bluebird Cafe. It is the part of Nashville that does not need to advertise itself because the people who belong there already know where it is.
The geography
Green Hills runs along Hillsboro Pike (US 431) and Abbott Martin Road, bordered roughly by Vanderbilt to the north and Radnor Lake to the south. The neighborhood is one of Nashville’s largest, with a mix of residential streets and commercial development concentrated along Hillsboro Pike. It sits within a few minutes of Vanderbilt, Belmont, and Lipscomb universities, which gives it institutional density that Green Hills itself does not visually signal.
The shopping
The Mall at Green Hills is the destination that people mean when they reference shopping in Green Hills. It has over 120 stores on two floors totaling over a million square feet, anchored by Nordstrom (the only one in Tennessee), Dillard’s, and Macy’s. Luxury brands include Saint Laurent, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Omega, Tiffany & Co., and Burberry. More than 55 stores are unique-to-market for Nashville. The mall was acquired by Simon Property Group in a full buyout completed November 2025.
Adjacent to the mall on Hillsboro Pike, Hill Center Green Hills provides a walkable outdoor retail experience with Anthropologie, lululemon, Kendra Scott, Vineyard Vines, Pottery Barn, West Elm, and Billy Reid. The combination of the enclosed mall and the outdoor center makes Green Hills the most complete retail destination in Tennessee.
The Bluebird Cafe
The Bluebird Cafe is technically in a Green Hills strip mall on Hillsboro Pike. Its reputation extends well past the neighborhood, it is one of the most important small venues in the country for songwriter development, famous for its listening room format and the artists who performed there before becoming household names. It seats around 100 people and requires advance planning to attend.
The housing
Green Hills homes are predominantly mid-20th-century ranch-style houses on large lots, a product of the neighborhood’s development in the 1950s and 1960s. Median prices now run around $1,062,000. New construction luxury homes push $6 million on corner lots. The neighborhood is significantly safer than Nashville’s urban average, PropertyClub notes it experiences less than 0.06% of Davidson County’s violent crimes.
Who it is for
Green Hills is for people who want proximity to Nashville’s amenities without Nashville’s urban density or noise, who need access to good schools, and who are not uncomfortable spending significant money on where they live. The neighborhood feels finished in a way that newer parts of Nashville do not, established trees, wide streets, large houses set back from the road, no tall-skinny townhome infill. That stability is part of what people pay for.
Sources
- Visit Nashville TN, Green Hills neighborhood page
- Mall at Green Hills, shopgreenhills.com
- Mall at Green Hills, Wikipedia (Simon Property Group buyout, November 2025)
- Seeing Tennessee, Mall at Green Hills guide, June 2025
- Acre State Real Estate, Green Hills neighborhood guide
- PropertyClub, Safest Neighborhoods in Nashville, 2024