This project renovated and expanded the 2-story, 1950’s era Brown Hall Building on the Western Carolina University campus in Cullowhee, NC. The ground floor houses the convenience store, which captures students converging down the hill to classes throughout the day. The second level houses offices for Campus Services, Residential Life and Community Ethics. The top floor includes the dining hall, an indoor seating area featuring a large stone fireplace, as well as scenic outdoor seating areas including a rooftop terrace, hillside plaza, a fire pit and a water feature. The dining hall can be used for presentations, performances, and meetings. The large conference room and adjacent medium conference rooms can be used as traditional conference/huddle rooms and as a student body association trial room. Thorburn Associates is proud to have been a part of this award-winning project, providing comprehensive audiovisual design and acoustical consulting services.

Architect: Watson Tate Savory. This project obtained LEED Gold certification and received the 2018 AIA Columbia Merit Award for Adaptive Reuse/Renovation as well as the 2018 AIA Charlotte Architectural Design Citation.