base2 

My 1989 Pugeot Montreal Express has a Shimano Nexus 7 with an 18 tooth cog paired with a 52-36 double. The secret sauce is the vintage abarasque Shimano 600 short cage derailleur.

Lessons learned on the project:
I found that the freewheel mechanism had enough internal resistance that the extra chain tension provided by a short cage derailleur was warranted.

I had to obtain the appropriate anti-rotation washers, for the hub shifting mechanism to point where it made sense.

I needed to use a fine tooth hacksaw to cut the chainstay cable stop lengthwise to facilitate wheel removal. (Turned it into a split cable stop)

Additionally, there needed to be a short section of cable housing to get from the chainstay cable stop to the hub. The cable housing was too short to be practical unless it was flexible coil wound brake housing since the location was originally intended to serve a derailleur system. No big deal in practice, even if difficult & inconvenient to work with. The housing did need metal ferrules to stay put at the hub because of hub shifter cable stop design.

In the end, I brazed on a new split cable stop about 2 inches further away. That solved all the issues, inconvenience & allowed shifter cable housing to be used. But I think there maybe clamp on cable stops that would work as well if you find difficulty & choose not to braze.

Also a cable break/splitter like you find on S&S coupled bikes makes a lot of sense so you never need to fuss with the hub shifting mechanism or be tied to the bike when removing the wheel.

IGH's have limited ratio restrictions.
The Nexus 7 is 2:1...So, an 18 tooth cog can only be driven by a 36 tooth or bigger sprocket. From there it's a matter of finding a large chain ring that avoids duplicate ratios. A 52-36 crankset provides decent spread with evenly spaced non-duplicates. But that only matters if you care about evenly spaced gears; 53-39 lines up with nearly all duplicates.

A 53-36 or 50-34 crankset works nearly as well as a 52-36 but not quite as good in terms of spread between gears. A 19 tooth cog is the lowest Shimano legal but isn't as low in ratio as 18/36 and the gear spacing is less even across the range.

The next suitable ratio I found was a 28-40 like available on an XT M785 crankset, but a 14 tooth Sturmey Archer cog is too small in diameter to fit the Nexus hub. (The chain will rub on stuff) So, I had to scrap that idea.

Further on the crankset side, is q-factor. The road crank arms kept hitting the chain stays on my particular project. So my gut reaction is to suggest a mountain crankset as it is more likely to work if converting an older wide chainstayed mountain bike with a 68mm bottom bracket shell. Conversly, that means Hollowtech road stuff is less likely to work IMO/IME. Of course that depends on what you are starting with. The dilly is modern 4 bolt mountain bike cranksets won't do the optimal 52-36 chainrings even if you spacer out the 68mm bottom bracket shell. So you have a connundrum. (sp?)

In my case, the ideal solution was a 116mm square taper bottom bracket and a generic mountain bike triple with a 110mm 5 armed crank spider. The 52-36 rings bolted right on. Easy as pie.

By way of experimenting from the parts box after giving up on the Hollowtech route: The 110mm bottom bracket I first tried caused interference between the rings & the chainstay, & the 123mm bottom bracket made for terrible chainline & terrible shifting to the big ring on account of being at the extreme range of the front derailleur.

I mention all this because although the system works beautifully it may take a little experimenting & budget to find the best combination of components.

353% range in total from 31.3 to 110 gear inches.
The percentage jump between gears is 17, 14, 8, 8, 8, 7, 6, 10, 7, 8, 7, 17, & 16%
So the bike is good for about 8 to about 30 miles per hour at 90rpm. With the closest ratios between 12-22 mph.

Info overload, I know. But, TLDR; Yes, someone has tried it.