CLEARWATER — The Palm Pavilion Inn on Clearwater Beach will be demolished and replaced with a nine-story, 144-room hotel under a development agreement City Council members approved unanimously.
The vote awarded the project 91 units from the city’s Hotel Density Reserve, the allocation the developer needed to reach 144 rooms. The agreement, between the city and applicants MHG Palm Pavilion Hotel and Sixth Flag Planted, joins parcels at 10 and 18 Bay Esplanade into a single site.
The restaurant next door — the original Palm Pavilion, now operating as Crabby’s Beachside — will be preserved and folded into the hotel operation.
“The applicant desires to redevelop the hotel portion of the site to provide for an updated hotel, while maintaining the historic restaurant as a benefit to hotel patrons, guests and visitors alike,” attorney Katie Cole wrote in a narrative filed for the developer.
The site sits in the Tourist District and the Old Florida District of Beach by Design, the beach redevelopment plan that governs the reserve units. The conceptual site plan describes the building as tropical modern architecture, in keeping with the tropical vernacular the plan envisions.
Both parcels were developed in 1926. The west portion holds the 7,895-square-foot restaurant. The east portion holds 30 overnight units, which would come down.
Planning staff said 144 rooms require at least 173 off-street parking spaces, and a garage on the first four floors would provide exactly that. Those levels would also hold maintenance rooms and trash and laundry facilities. An amenity area would occupy the fifth floor, with guest rooms on the sixth through ninth.
The site has historically been served by 32 spaces, Cole said, adding that restaurant patrons arriving on their own would be inclined to use the public parking adjacent to the property on the north and south.
Two-way driveways from Bay Esplanade to the south and Kendall Street to the north would feed the garage. The main pedestrian entrance would be on the south side, with a secondary entrance on the north.
Because the building sits in a VE flood zone, FEMA rules limit the ground floor to parking, storage, the building entry and the elevator lobby. At least 60% of the street-level facades would be transparent, and no more than 10% of any street-level window could be made opaque.
Sidewalks would be 7 feet wide along Bay Esplanade and 5 feet along Kendall Street to match the adjacent walkways. Landscaping would be designed to code and submitted with the development review committee application.
Setbacks and stepbacks follow the Old Florida district’s standards. Along Bay Esplanade, the building would sit back 10 feet and step back 15 feet, exceeding the 13-foot, 4-inch stepback required at 35 feet of height. On Kendall Street, the developer proposed eliminating a required 20-foot stepback by pushing the setback back an additional 10 feet; the code allows 2 feet of stepback reduction for every extra foot of setback. The east side would meet the required 5-foot interior side setback.
On the west, the new hotel would not attach to the restaurant but would cantilever over part of its rear.
The restaurant stands seaward of the Coastal Construction Control Line. Once the hotel density is vested, Cole said, the applicants will seek approval of a unified site plan along with termination of the restaurant’s nonconforming status.
“The hotel and restaurant operations will be integrated, allowing the existing restaurant to provide food and beverage service as an amenity to hotel guests,” she wrote. The restaurant would also handle takeout and room service.
The agreement requires the developer to win site plan approval within a year, begin vertical construction within four years of that approval and obtain a certificate of occupancy within six years. It bars converting any reserve unit to residential use and requires a recorded covenant limiting those units to overnight accommodations.