A significant expansion of Hill House will restore symmetry to the building.
At School Meeting on Tuesday, February 11, Head of School Dr. Alex Curtis unveiled plans for the renovation of Hill House after the building was damaged by a fire last summer.
Though the fire, which began on July 22, was contained to a relatively small area within the building, extensive water damage has led to plans for a full-renovation and rebuilding of Hill House, both inside and out. Planned changes to the building include redesigning the foyer, restoring the college counseling office, creating a faculty lounge, and redesigning the Hill House dorm.
The original layout of the Hill House entrance, built in 1911, featured a lone-fireplace with walkways on either side, allowing students to see directly into the dining hall. After being renovated in the 1990s to bring the building up to fire code, however, this open-concept entrance was lost.
According to Dr. Curtis, new technologies will now make this layout possible, and it will be implemented in the renovation. “Coming out of the dining hall, you used to see the fireplace and around it. We love this, and when I talk to alumni and faculty who were here, they all talk about how welcoming that living-room area was and how it was a central space on campus. We are trying to make that entrance a gathering place again for all types of different opportunities and experiences,” said Dr. Curtis.
College counseling will remain the same, except for slight renovations. Before College Counseling moved into the space and a fake floor was put in order to level the entrance, the facility used to be a few steps down from the foyer, so renovations plan to raise the ceiling and allow for a level entrance.
Before the fire this past summer, the entrance to the Hill House dormitory was situated behind the fireplace and could be seen when one exited the dining hall. Since the fireplace will be returning to its original appearance with walkways on either side of it, the dormitory staircases will also return to their original position on either side of the door to Hill House.
The faculty offices that were situated in the corridor leading to Andrew Mellon Library will be relocated and replaced by a faculty lounge. “When we think about this as the lounge of the school and the student center being there and near to the dining hall, we wanted to do the same for our faculty,” Dr. Curits said in his school meeting announcement. Since this faculty lounge will replace the old Dean of Faculty offices and the corridor to the library, a walkway will be added behind Hill House and connect it to the breezeway. This same structure was added behind Hill House after the construction of St. John Hall, so this addition will mirror its construction and connect the complex to the library.
Two rooms will be added near the entrance of the dining hall to serve as private dining rooms where classes or clubs can meet and bring in dining hall food. “We don’t really have space to do it in the regular dining hall, but these rooms will be better versions of the Head’s Study to enable that,” said Dr. Curtis. In addition to these two new rooms, single-use bathrooms will be added.
The Hill House dormitory will be renovated in an adaptive fashion to allow for any sort of housing, whether it be single gender, binary gender, or all-gender with a shared common space. There will be 32 new beds and a separating common space as well as smaller common spaces within each side for flexibility.
According to Dr. Curtis, this design of multiple common rooms will be similar to that of the Kohler Environmental Center, which already has a main co-ed common room and two smaller common rooms on the separate boys’ and girls’ floors. Additionally, design teams will incorporate small kitchen areas, laundry, and single-use bathrooms.
“We’ve really tried to think about questions brought up by students and faculty on how to create a dorm for all students and try to test some things out to model on other dorms going forward,” Dr. Curtis said. On the upper floor, the faculty apartments will be enlarged and given private entrances.
The dorm renovation, which aims to incorporate new features while maintaining a similar number of available beds, the north side of Hill House will be expanded by two window arches. The symmetry was previously lost due to the development of expansions and renovations to the building on the south side. With the shortening of the breezeway from Hill House to the Library, the symmetry of the building will once again be achieved.
The Hill House fire shifted the renovation of the building to the top of the administration’s priorities, and it is part of a larger renovation scheme involving several buildings around campus. Although the administration has not yet announced the timeline for future projects, the Dean of Faculty offices are set to be moved to Archbold, and the former Student Activities Center will be renovated to house the Admissions Office. Planning for a renovation of the Paul Mellon Arts Center will begin within the next few years.
Graphic by Sesame Gaetsaloe/The Choate News
