Villa Theatre is main attraction on its own

When the Villa Theatre reopens later this year, you won't find towering images of Brad Pitt or Nicole Kidman staring down from the screen.

Instead, thousands of imported hand-woven rugs will be on display in a restored building.

It will be a theater turned rug gallery, but more than an ordinary rug gallery.

Hamid Adib, who purchased the theater in 2004 after hearing of plans to demolish the building, has spared no expense.

In fact, Adib said he will have spent more than $1 million on the building when completed.

Seismic upgrades, a new electrical system, a repaired roof and giant Greek-style columns are all part of the effort. The theater's original lobby and outside neon signs will be saved.

In addition, the theater's original stage will be preserved. But instead of a giant movie screen, patrons will see Persian, Oriental and European rugs, some selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

"We are going to fix it so it lasts forever," Adib said. "We wanted to make sure that when somebody walks into the Villa they can see the old Villa the way it was. The architectural integrity of it is going to be completely preserved inside and outside."

At the time of its opening in 1949, the Villa was considered one of the largest theaters in the West, featuring 1,300 seats in a stadium setting. Evening ticket prices were 75 cents for adults and 20 cents for children, according to the Web site villatheatre.com.

Adib said he has enduring memories of taking his own children to the theater.

After purchasing the Villa for an undisclosed price from the Harmons grocery store chain, Adib said he had no idea what he wanted to do with the structure, just a driving passion to save the building from demolition.

With so much competition from the multiplex movie houses, he eventually came to the conclusion that a single-stage theater could not survive economically, so he decided to move from his current store — Adib's Rug Gallery — to the structure.

"The theme of it will completely stay as the old Villa theater," Adib said. "We are going to keep a museum-like atmosphere, so people can come in and revive their old memories."

Those memories include Saturday afternoon matinees that Nolen Mendenhall, chief architect of the theater's renovation, remembers fondly.

"I used to go to the Saturday matinees that they had there in the late '60s and early '70s," Mendenhall said. "Your parents could give you two bucks and you could go in and they would have three or four movies, and you could buy candy and popcorn. Imagine that theater full of hundreds of kids running around."

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