The face of Darlington’s Upper School campus is in the process of changing again. By the opening of school year 2003-2004, two new girls houses will have joined Persons Hall around a newly created courtyard and will replace Trippeer Hall. The Gibbons House where Gordon Neville, associate headmaster and dean of students, and his wife, Betsy, lived for the past 22 years, has already been demolished.
“The architects, Cooper Carry, met with a committee of girls from both of the houses affected by the new construction, Griffeth and Erlandson Houses, as well as with the heads of house to understand their needs,” Vice President for Finance Bob Rogers said. The architects have designed residential buildings that look like Tudor-style houses inside and out, not dorms, in keeping with Darlington’s English House system.
The design offers the girls access to several common areas, including a large central area on the main floor that is open to the second floor, and has no interior corridors and lots of natural light. House faculty will live in apartments located on the front corners of each House with girls’ rooms on either side of them, rather than at the ends of long halls as found in typical dorms. Each house will accommodate 36 girls (two to a room), two faculty members and the head of house and their families.
“These houses will become prototypes for future houses to accommodate the School’s boarding program,” Rogers said.
“Deciding to abandon Trippeer Hall was a very hard decision for the Board of Trustees,” President David Hicks said. “The timing is not ideal; we would rather have waited until the economy improved and the School was ready to launch its next capital campaign. But all the experts tell us that Trippeer’s structural and engineering problems are too costly to repair. Not only does a renovation not pass the test of a cost-benefit analysis, but it would not give us a residential situation compatible with the School’s popular new House system.”
Trippeer Hall, built through the generosity of the Trippeer family of Memphis, Tenn., may have not lived a long life, but it has lived a full one. When the building was finally inspected in late June 1968, its final price tag was $392,000. Even in those days, it was a good deal.
For five years, Trippeer housed boys. Then, in 1973, when Darlington became coeducational, girls took over the dorm. As the 2002-2003 school year begins, Trippeer now holds the Griffeth and Erlandson girls houses with three floors each.
Carter & Associates recommended that, at an estimated project cost of $6.5 million, the School can build two new girls houses for about thirty percent more than the cost to repair Trippeer. The Board of Trustees weighed the cost to repair against the cost to build and made the difficult decision this summer to proceed, despite the fact that contributions had not been raised for the project.
To pay for the costs to raze Trippeer and build the two houses, the Board voted to have tax-exempt bonds issued. Proceeds from the sale of these bonds will pay project costs. The School will then need to raise funds to pay back the bonds as part of a larger capital campaign connected with Darlington’s Centennial Celebration in 2005.
Plans to proceed with construction of the two new houses have caused the demise of one other building on campus. To avoid having to raze the Neville’s house, the School offered to give it to anyone who would move it.
“We had about a dozen inquiries, but economically it didn’t make sense for anyone to undertake it,” Rogers said. The house was torn down in late August. Grading for the two new houses began immediately after that. “Our goal is to have girls move into the new houses at the start of the 2003-2004 school year,” Rogers said.
This summer, Betsy and Gordon Neville moved into the house next to the old gym, which has been serving as a guesthouse. Guests will now stay in an apartment in what was the Student Activities building, now part of the Huffman Memorial Athletic Center.
