CAMPUS CENTER REDESIGN: LIVELIER SPACE, BETTER CAFÉ

Carpenters, painters and decorators are putting the finishing touches on newly renovated spaces in the Campus Center in anticipation of its grand reopening on Thursday, Feb. 17. A much-improved Uncommon Grounds Café will open for business at 8 a.m., and at noon, President Nancy J. Vickers, Dean of the Undergraduate College Karen Tidmarsh and SGA President Amanda Glendenning will lead a brief ceremony to rededicate the space; light refreshments will be served. During opening week, each purchase at Uncommon Grounds will earn the customer a chance in a raffle for a motorized, gas-powered scooter.

Artist’s rendering of the Main Lounge as seen from the mezzanine, courtesy of Venturi Scott Brown and Associates

In the refurbished space, designed by Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, what was formerly a meeting room on the first floor will become a recreation-and-entertainment center for students, complete with a pool table and a giant high-definition plasma-screen TV with surround-sound speakers and DVD-viewing capability. New furniture, rugs, paint and graphics, including banners, murals and quotations from notable Bryn Mawr alumnae, enliven the building's interior. Solid doors have been replaced with glass-paned ones and some new openings cut to improve pedestrian flow and introduce more visual connections among the various spaces; warmer colors, a working fireplace and new furniture groupings create subspaces with a more relaxed, intimate feel, says Christopher Gluesing, assistant director of Facilities Services for projects and planning. "And it's a much livelier space," he adds.

Facilities Services Director Glenn Smith points to technological improvements as well. "The whole area is a wireless hot spot," he notes, "so people won't need to plug in their laptops to connect to the Internet. Computers are being provided for those who want to check their e-mail or surf the Web. Multiple speaker systems for the separate areas provide interconnection capabilities to support various public address or music options. Satellite radio will give students hundreds of listening choices."

The new recreation room is equipped with gallery-style track lighting suitable for art exhibitions. It will be furnished with bar tables and stools, as well as stylish, comfortable chairs for watching TV, and the Main Lounge will also contain overflow seating for Uncommon Grounds. Inside the café, there will be more seating options than there were before the renovation, Gluesing says: "There will be a bar where customers can stand, as well as stools, tables and chairs, and booths."

But new seating barely scratches the surface of the changes to the thoroughly overhauled café. A more contemporary décor features custom neon, including a lantern design. Café Manager Richard Clow expects the reconceived layout and new, more efficient equipment to make a dramatic improvement in service.

"We've spent a lot of time thinking about how to arrange things so that they're logical for the customers and efficient for the workers. We have a cash register that sends orders directly to the kitchen, eliminating a step from the process. And we've tried to make sure that everything workers need is close at hand. For instance, making a smoothie used to require walking about 50 feet because all the ingredients and equipment were in different places. Now everything is within about four feet. That sort of improvement saves customers a lot of waiting time."

A new coffee brewer will allow the café to brew three times as much coffee as it did before renovations, potentially eliminating the need to refill urns during rush times. The café's slightly expanded menu will include panini sandwiches, thanks to a new panini grill, and Clow is enthusiastic about the new brand of coffee he'll be serving. "Pura Vida Coffee is a step beyond Fair Trade Coffee," he says. "All the company's profits are donated to antipoverty programs in coffee-producing countries. And it's organic, shade-grown — it’s great coffee."

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