The Palladium Is Cutting Out a Plaster Ceiling to Stop Being a Church With a Stage

Executive Director Paul Wilborn is blunt about the problem: the venue has been operating for 28 years as a church with a stage. The $13 million renovation that started in August 2026 is what turns it into a performing arts centre. The last performance before closure was July 31, and reopening is planned for late 2027.

Project Scope

The headline intervention is overhead. The existing plaster ceiling, which sits below a 12-foot attic void, comes out entirely and gets replaced with a new acoustic ceiling modelled on opera-house proportions. Acoustic shutters let the room switch between amplified rock and unamplified chamber music, which Hough Hall has historically handled badly. Also in scope: all new seating, a rebuilt balcony, reworked lighting positions, new curtains, replacement windows and a new roof. The pipe organ came out ahead of construction, opening a new performance position above the stage. The lobby and the historic interior and exterior detailing stay, and the building is already fully ADA accessible.

Creative Contractors is general contractor, with Earl Swensson Associates as architect, Stages Consultants on theatre planning and Akustiks on acoustics. Two houses come back: Hough Hall at 815 seats and the Side Door at 175.

Why It Matters

Howard Lovewell Cheney designed this as a First Church of Christ, Scientist in 1925. It was converted to a theater in 1998 and has been run by St. Petersburg College since 2007. A church converted to a concert hall inherits a room shaped for the spoken word and congregational singing, and that 12-foot void above the plaster is dead space a purpose-built hall would have used for volume and reflection. Recovering it is the whole acoustic argument.

The money is the other story. An organisation that historically raised about $150,000 a year spent four years assembling more than $8 million in private gifts and nearly $5 million in government funding.

Project Team & Details