Hostess Brands Inc. — a Charlotte Avenue store for which ranks among West Nashville’s more well-recognized businesses — is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

The Nashville store will not be affected, according to media reports.

Company officials are citing troubles with pension and medical benefits obligations and increased competition.

Hostess Brands is the maker of Twinkies and Wonder Bread, among other baked products.

Located at 4111 Charlotte Ave., the Nashville Hostess serves as a wholesale bakery.

Hostess Brands is based in Irving, Texas, and operates in 49 states, with 36 regional bakeries including the Wonder bakery at 400 Monroe Ave. in Memphis and a Knoxville plant.
 

Nashville-based restaurateur Austin Ray announced Wednesday his company has purchased the former Lavender Motors site at 4408 Charlotte Ave., on which he plans to operate a neighborhood bar.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Ray is best known for his involvement with the long-closed and very edgy nightclub BarTwenty3 in The Gulch and his popular Berry Hill bar The Melrose. For this latest project, construction has begun on the renovation and expansion of the Tudor-style brick building that was originally a 1920s service station and more recently a used car lot.

In March 2011, 4408 Charlotte Pike Partners bought the property for $400,000, with George Spiva as the lone listed general partner. Spiva has fronted a number of hip retail and restaurant projects, including The Melrose.

“I’m excited to bring my newest project to West Nashville and I’m confident the neighborhoods nearby, including Sylvan Park and Historic West Town, will welcome new business to the area and the revitalization of a vacant building,” Ray said in a release, adding he is still finalizing plans for the project.

The stretch of Charlotte Avenue from 44th Avenue on the east to White Bridge Road on the west has garnered media headlines the past few years as it continues to be redeveloped. Mainstays include Bobbie’s Dairy Dip, Rhino Books, Las Palmas, Southern Thrift and the Darkhorse Theater. Among the relative newcomers are Miel Restaurant, the West Nashville Metro Police Precinct, The Great Escape, Stone House BBQ, Harmony Yoga and Boa Clothing. 

Las Vegas-based sweet treats seller Nothing Bundt Cakes will open its first Nashville-area store on White Bridge Road in a few weeks. The venture will be run by former O'Charley's CEO Jeff Warne — who left that chain in the summer of last year — and will be near Porta Via Italian Kitchen. Apparently, some of its offerings will be just short of monstrous.

Nothing Bundt Cakes stores are almost like boutiques, with giftie merchandise as well as cakes. The bundts can be ordered for various occasions, with the cakes hole serving as a handy receptacle for decor items like a bow or a flower. (There's a workplace celebration cake with the slogan "From the 'Hole' Office.") Cake sizes range from one serving to 26.

SEE ALSO: Sweet spots, our story this week on the growth and future of other dessert concepts

Among the top-sellers in Nashville residential real estate this month is a lovely, 1930s, 5,000-ish square-footer — recently renovated — on Whitland. It was purchased by Dr. Michael Neuss and his wife, Gwyneth, for $1.24 million in a deal that closed late in April and was filed with the Davidson County Register of Deeds Monday. Dr. Neuss was named the Chief Medical Officer at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center back in February. He'll start that gig — he's VICC's first CMO — July 1.

Why are we giving you this free preview of Headline Homes when the next edition will appear in Monday's City Paper with the year-in-review edition in the following issue?

Frankly, it's to clear up some confusion.

Various celeb gossip blogs picked up this item recently from Us Weekly:

More proof their little girl is all grown up? Taylor Swift recently bought her mom and dad, Andrea and Scott Swift, a $1.4 million home in Nashville, Tenn..

The three-bedroom, 5,000 square-foot estate -- built in the 1920s -- was recently renovated and boasts a blue stone terrace and a massive outdoor fireplace. "It's an incredible house," a source close to the 21-year-old Grammy winner tells the new Us Weekly.

Sounds awfully familiar, right? Roughly the same size, same age, same price range, though not exactly right, as the house on Whitland. In compiling the April Headline Homes list, we figured we'd found Taylor's gift to mom and dad. Until the actual purchasers of the Whitland house were revealed via public record. 

So what gives?

In the wake of the US Weekly piece, Real Estalker ID'd the house more specifically:

Information about the brick-built residence that Your Mama horse-whispered out of the interweb shows that the somewhat staid but not particularly imposing residence (above) with its sensuous low-profile eyebrow dormer was at listed for $1,595,000. Property records reveal it was sold, way back in September 2010, for $1,400,000.

If Real Estalker is right — and why not? — then the new home of Mom and Dad of Taylor is not on Whitland itself, but rather around the corner on Bowling and was reported by the inestimable E. Thomas Wood back in October:

Who really owns this renovated 1920s home remains a tightly held secret, despite all the wiles typically deployed in researching this column. Morgan, of the Morgan & Akins law firm, has been known to represent celebrities in past real estate transactions.

The Penningtons listed it at just under $1.7 million and held on for more than six months before accepting the lower offer. Thomas Pennington, a lawyer formerly with Manier & Herod PC, is now a partner at Watt, Tieder, Hoffar & Fitzgerald LLP in McLean, Va. Kathryn Pennington is also an attorney and practiced for some years with the Nashville firm of Gullett, Sanford, Robinson & Martin PLLC.

So Us Weekly's "source close to the singer" got it right — just seven months late and coincidentially reported it at the same time as another, similar house was sold.