Contractors began construction on the French House in mid-December, forcing students to reroute walks to the 459 dining hall and nearby residence halls and transplanting the Roger Hadfield Ogden Honors College to the basement of Johnston Hall.
The building was a residence hall when the University moved to its current location in the ’30s. It needed renovation to provide better use of the space for the college, said Liz Billet, communications coordinator for the Honors
College.
“Basically, the point of the renovation is to rearrange that space so it’s not like a little warren of rooms and hallways,” Billet said. “There’s about 19,000 square feet in the building, but most of it before the renovation was in hallways and stairwells, so we couldn’t use it.”
The renovations will cost about $6 million. The plans are part of the University’s most recent five-year plan for the use of capital outlay funding from the state. The LSU Board of Supervisors approved the plans early last
year.
English freshman and Honors College student Niara Collins said the construction hasn’t bothered her, except when she walks to class from her dorm room in East Laville Hall.
“It creates more mud around the French House, so when I’m walking between my classes and my dorm, I track mud, so it’s been kind of annoying,” Collins said.
Honors College Dean Jonathan Earle said the project is scheduled to take about 11 months to complete, and the college hopes to move back into the building by spring 2016.
“It looks like big, major demolition,” Earle said. “The inside of the salon has been taken down, there’s no staircase anymore. They told me last Wednesday they are ahead of schedule.”
The building was built in 1935 and designed with a divider through the middle of the building to separate male and female residents, Billet said.
In 1981, the University removed the division, but the French House still resembled a residence hall inside, Billet said. She said the building also needed repairs because plaster was falling from the ceiling and it was run
down.
Architects from Tipton Associates, a Baton Rouge-based architecture firm, designed renovations for the building to make it more usable for students and faculty.
In the meantime, Billet said it has been difficult to make sure students know the college is in Johnston Hall.
She said while moving offices was inconvenient, it’s nice for the college’s administrators to be along the same hallway because offices were scattered throughout the French House.
“There is space in the basement of Johnston that is what you call swing spaces, so [the University] are pretty good at accommodating wayward departments like ours,” Earle said. “We are very much on top of each other here, in very small cramped quarters unlike the French House, but we love each other.”
With a recent donation of 12 million dollars, the French House undergoes renovations on Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2015, right off of Highland Road.
