Hetzel Hall Turns 100 in Style After Major Renovation
Modernized building ready to welcome students for new academic year
Tuesday, August 19, 2025
Students sitting in a lounge space inside a residence hall

Any question as to how deep Kristin Carpenter’s connection to UNH’s Hetzel Hall runs can be answered by a group messaging thread her children share with their friends.

Carpenter met her husband, Kevan, in Hetzel when she was an RA there in the 1990s, and both just retired from UNH on the same day this spring after long careers on campus. The pair also met a group of lifelong friends while living in the building, friends they still get together with multiple times each year.

Like Kristin and Kevan, many of those friends have started families, and their kids have grown close over the years and stay connected in part through a group thread affectionately titled “Children of Hetzel.”

“It’s a pretty long backstory,” Carpenter admits, regarding her decades-long ties to the building.

And thanks to a recently completed full-scale renovation that allowed Hetzel to re-open for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic, incoming Wildcats will now have the opportunity to author similar personal stories.

Image of a dorm room with a bed on the left, a window in the center and a desk on the right
A dorm room inside renovated hetzel hall.

Hetzel celebrated its 100th birthday in grand style this spring, as the interior overhaul was officially unveiled and the building welcomed student residents for the first time since being shut down during the pandemic.

It was the first significant renovation in the building’s 100-year history. The official grand opening ceremony to the public was held Saturday, June 7 during spring reunion, welcoming more than 70 guests.

“Everything on the inside of the building was dramatically changed from what it was before,” says Andy Petters, director of housing at UNH. “The university embarked on this full-scale renovation, and in partnership with the design team and contractor did a really wonderful job of gathering feedback from students, from across the university and from housing and residential life staff to really make sure the scope of the project aligned with the needs of students in 2025.”

Carpenter, who retired from her role as associate director of residential life this spring after a 30-year career at UNH, was involved at various stages in the planning of the overhaul and was able to tour the renovated building after it opened with many of the friends she made during her time at UNH. And although things certainly looked different than they did when she first moved in during January of 1990, she was thrilled to see the building with some new life.

“If anything, that experience I had with my friend group, I would want that building to be able to provide that for future generations,” Carpenter says.

Feedback from those future generations played a key role in the renovation, Petters says, as the university – along with contractor Wright Ryan and Lavallee Brensinger Architects – sought out student input in hopes of modernizing the building in a way that best appealed to the generation that would be living there.

The result is a building featuring more single bedrooms, more private bathrooms and a kitchen space near the first-floor lounge area designed to encourage gatherings among residents. The building also now features air conditioning, an amenity Carpenter says she and her friends would have loved to have back the 90s.

“It was all about interviewing students and getting feedback from them, figuring out the things they want to see in their UNH experience and how they want to live and experience their life here,” says Katie Bartholomew, director of residential life.

Another addition to the building was an elevator, which created one of the more unique challenges of the renovation, Petters says, as giant steel beams had to be placed underneath the building so it could rest on them as space for the elevator shaft and other utilities was created.

There is laundry on the first and third floor – and laundry is now included in housing at UNH, Petters notes – and the updated bathrooms feature barn-style sliding doors in several areas to create additional flexibility and opportunities for privacy.

The first cohort of students to move into the renovated space arrived in January 2025 and was made up primarily of students new to UNH, either transfers or first-year students beginning in the spring. The upcoming academic year will mark the first full school year that the updated building will be occupied.

Feedback from those first residents was overwhelmingly positive.

“They loved it, and some of them chose to return there as residents this coming year,” Petters says. “Students by-and-large want to be in Hetzel, it was a very popular building selection choice for first-year students, and it filled more quickly than any other building.”

That success can serve as a model for future residence hall renovations, Petters and Bartholomew say, as Hetzel is likely to serve as something of a blueprint for other potential upcoming projects.

“Hopefully this is the beginning of many other buildings that we’re able to add some more life and longevity to,” Petters says.

Modernizing a century-old building while trying to preserve some historic charm is a difficult balancing act. While the exterior of Hetzel Hall received a new roof and new windows among other improvements, all of the upgrades were made with every effort to maintain the historical look and feel that people have come to associate with a building considered a “cornerstone of UNH’s campus,” Petters says.

That tug of war between modern and nostalgic is what made the Hetzel renovation project a complicated one for Carpenter emotionally. But given the outdated interior and desire to better meet student needs she was ultimately 100% on board, particularly in regards to the focus on communal spaces that encourage socializing and camaraderie (Petters says Carpenter was a key advocate for particular door holds used in the building that can prop doors open – unless there’s a fire alarm – to facilitate interacting with neighbors.)

After all, it was the social aspect of her Hetzel experience that created the connections she has cherished and strengthened for more than three decades of her life.

“It was a little bittersweet, but the associate director of residential life in me very much understood and supported the need, and the community builder in me very much knew that the lounge space, the public spaces and gathering spaces were going to be so vital for the ability of the people in the building to build relationships,” she says. “It’s so exciting to see.”

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