Villa Maria College Renovates Historic Dining Hall

By Eric Althoff

BUFFALO, N.Y.—Villa Maria College, a liberal arts educational facility in upstate New York, will be upgrading its dining hall this summer, with the space projected to be ready in time for the fall semester of 2022.

According to a recent news release from the school, the college is still utilizing the original dining hall, which was constructed for the school’s opening in 1961.  The dining hall is decked out in the school’s orange-and-white colors, and is one of the campus’s more popular locations for gatherings.  Accordingly, after 61 years, the dining hall is in need of some renovations and upgrades.

The school announced that part of the funding will come from grants, and Villa Maria will be seeking other donations to fund the renovation of the dining commons.

“I’m very fond of saying Villa is home,” Villa Maria President Dr. Matthew Giordano said in a recent video discussing the project.  “There’s no doubt that the heart of our home is the dining hall. It’s where our students congregate and hang out, it’s the place where one of our greatest Villa traditions, the Halloween Hijinx, takes place, it’s the place where families celebrate their graduates on the morning of Commencement, and much more.”

No information has yet been released by the college on what firms will be undertaking the renovation work this summer, however, Villa Maria anticipates getting started on the project sometime in August.

Villa Maria is a smaller college with only a few hundred students.  The school also features an interior design program that is fully accredited.