It is common for office employees to complain their workspace is so small they feel like they are in a closet.
But Michael Nance really works in one.
Nance is a curriculum coordinator for Evanston/Skokie School District 65, which for the past 37 years has had offices based in a historic mansion. Sixty people work in the 30-room house, where former bedrooms, servant quarters, parlor rooms and even closets have been converted into offices.
Now the space crunch in the 20,300-square-foot house, at 1314 Ridge Ave., has officials considering whether it’s time to renovate or move.
The school board has hired a consultant to study the district’s office needs and come up with plans that could include remodeling the interior, building an addition, relocating to leased space or building a new administration center somewhere else.
“It’s not laid out as a modern office design,” board President Walter Carlson said. “It is, in certain respects, cramped.”
District workers have tried to be creative with the available space, such as the grand ballroom on the third floor.
“We converted the stage area–that’s where our computer room is,” said Therese O’Neill, district business manager. “The dance floor is a meeting room.”
Also, the former horse stables behind the house have been turned into storage space for paper and other materials and into small offices for the district’s maintenance department.
“It encourages organization,” Nance joked about his workspace, which he said measures about 8-by-7 feet.
He has tried to adapt by neatly arranging piles of work on the floor and, until recently, using a laptop computer instead of a desktop model. But the demands of his job required a full-size computer, so he pulled out a section of bookshelf to squeeze in the new machine.
District 65 purchased the home from Northwestern University for $175,000 in 1960 and moved in a year later after spending $236,000 on remodeling.
Northwestern received the residence as a donation from its original owner, a wealthy Evanston industrialist named George Dryden.
The brick mansion is considered an important example of the Georgian Revival style. It’s on the National Register of Historic Places and part of the Evanston Ridge Historic District, a local preservation area.
Built in 1915, the home was designed by George Maher, a Kenilworth architect who drew plans for opulent homes on the North Shore during the early 20th Century.
The building’s landmark designations would almost rule out tearing down the house and putting up a modern administration center, said Carlos Ruiz, preservation coordinator for the City of Evanston.
“The fact it was designed by George Maher is its number one significance. Also, it was one of the last mansions built in the Ridge historic area,” Ruiz said.
The landmark protections also would limit the scope of any addition to the house.
