Saturn Used to Build Cars Here. Now It Builds World Tours.

Drive south on Saturn Parkway past the GM plant and you'll pass a long, low complex set back from the road on Northfield Lane. Most people who've lived in Spring Hill more than a few years assume it's still government offices, maybe a leftover workforce training center from the Saturn days. A few know it houses call centers and satellite college programs. Almost nobody clocks it as the place where Carrie Underwood, Katy Perry, and Thomas Rhett have signed photos hanging in the lobby.

That building at 5000 Northfield Lane is Worldwide Stages, a 320,000-square-foot production campus spread across 38 acres where touring musicians rehearse full arena shows before they ever hit the road, and where film crews and video directors quietly shoot projects a few minutes from your kid's soccer practice. It didn't arrive as a splashy new development with a ribbon-cutting everyone remembers. It grew out of the same building that once trained Saturn dealers and mechanics, and the fact that almost no one in town connects those two chapters is itself the story.

The Original Job Behind the Same Walls

Spring Hill's entire modern identity traces back to one 1985 announcement: General Motors would build a new kind of car company here, and the town, which had only recently passed 1,000 residents, would never look the same. The first Saturn rolled off the assembly line on July 30, 1990, and within a few years the plant employed thousands and turned a sleepy Middle Tennessee crossroads into a company town.

The building on Northfield Lane wasn't the assembly plant itself. It was Saturn's corporate side: a two-story, 355,000-square-foot conference and training center where the company ran dealer education, mechanic certification, and corporate meetings. It carried a 100-seat auditorium and a 200-seat conference room, the kind of infrastructure a national automaker needs to train the people who'd eventually sell and service its cars all over the country.

When the Saturn Name Left, the Building Didn't

Once Saturn stopped operating as its own dedicated brand, the Northfield building kept working, just quieter. It became a patchwork of tenants: the South Central Tennessee Workforce Alliance, two call centers, satellite classrooms for college and technical programs, and for a stretch, the Spring Hill Chamber of Commerce itself.

On December 21, 2019, the City of Spring Hill closed on a deal to buy the whole 38-acre property for $8.18 million, financed through a $13.18 million bond issue. At the time, the plan was practical rather than glamorous: the city had outgrown its municipal buildings and floated using part of Northfield to expand the public library and eventually build a new police headquarters. It read like the kind of quiet civic real estate transaction that never makes it past the agenda item.

Two Years Later, a Nashville Production Company Bought Half of It

That changed on May 28, 2021, when Worldwide Stages LLC announced it had acquired the property to convert it into a series of soundstages built for one specific purpose: letting national touring acts build and rehearse their shows before going on the road. The company committed to a $35 million renovation with the first rehearsal stages targeted for the fourth quarter of 2021.

Spring Hill Alderman Matt Fitterer, an early supporter of the deal, put the symmetry plainly in the announcement:

"Saturn came to Spring Hill as a 'new kind of car company' so it's fitting that their former headquarters will now set the standard as the new way to produce and rehearse live music."

Part of the plan called for what the company billed as the largest music rehearsal soundstage in the country, an acre of unobstructed floor space with 100-foot ceilings built to accommodate arena-scale productions. By the time Worldwide Stages officially opened in early 2023, founder and CEO Kelly Frey told trade press the company expected to have invested more than $100 million in the campus once complete, with additional soundstages already planned beyond the original four.

Here's what that investment actually built inside the old Saturn walls:

• The Onyx Gallery, a 5,300-square-foot event space with three-story floor-to-ceiling windows, now booked for weddings, galas, and corporate gatherings
• A 1920s-style Speakeasy on the second floor, built around a solid wood bar, where touring artists and crews unwind after rehearsal
• Stage 8, a 20,000-square-foot flexible soundstage nicknamed the Black Box, used for everything from rehearsals to corporate seminars
• A 100-seat private screening theater for reviewing daily footage during film and TV shoots
• A full commercial kitchen and onsite medic and security staff, some of them former law enforcement, reflecting the high-profile clientele the campus is built to protect

So Who's Actually Walked Through Spring Hill for This?

The lobby walls at Worldwide Stages carry signed photos of artists who've used the facility, including Carrie Underwood, Katy Perry, Darius Rucker, TobyMac, TLC, Tyler Hubbard, Thomas Rhett, and Walker Hayes. Music videos have been filmed on the soundstages too. Megan Moroney's video for "I'm Not Pretty" and Nate Smith's video for "World on Fire" were both shot there, and Jake Wesley Rogers filmed a video for his song "Window" on the same campus.

Not every event is industry-only. In February 2024, the campus hosted an outreach benefit for The Spring Hill Well, a local nonprofit, with Michael W. Smith, Helen Smallbone, and Rebecca St. James appearing as special guests. Worldwide Stages has also opened its doors for a live Misfits Boxing card, letting a general audience into a facility that otherwise operates behind closed gates.

Here's how the building's two lives stack up side by side:

Why This Matters If You Live Anywhere Near Saturn Parkway

Frey has pointed out that Worldwide Stages sits about 30 minutes south of Nashville, close enough to function as an extension of Music Row's back office rather than a distant satellite. That proximity means the crews working there rely on the same businesses Spring Hill residents already use. The Fainting Goat Coffee Co., Starbucks, Panera, Target, and Home Depot all sit within five minutes of the campus, feeding coffee runs and equipment pickups for people who spend their days building tours most of us will only ever see on an arena stage.

The campus is still growing. When it opened, Worldwide Stages had already stated plans to add soundstages beyond its original four, which means more production trucks, more tour buses, and more out-of-state plates parked along Saturn Parkway in the years ahead, not fewer.

So the next time you're stopped at a light near Northfield Lane behind a bus wrapped for a national tour, or a trailer with an out-of-state production company's logo on the side, you're not imagining anything unusual. The building doing that work used to train Saturn's mechanics. Now it's where the next arena tour gets built before it goes anywhere else, and it's been sitting there the whole time, a few minutes from wherever you live.

Knowing what's actually happening behind a town's landmarks is part of understanding a place before you ever buy or sell a home in it. If you're curious what else is changing in Spring Hill, or you want to know what your own home is worth in a town that keeps finding new reasons to grow, Gabrielle Grooters is happy to talk it through. Schedule a free consultation or grab an instant home valuation anytime.