The Hoya toured Henle Village, the newest residential complex at Georgetown University, which aims to draw members of the senior class to on-campus housing options.
Construction of the two-building complex, which will house up to 730 students, is on track to finish over the summer ahead of student move-in this fall. The renovated Henle includes apartment-style living, a ground floor with a communal kitchen, a prayer and meditation room, a quiet room, a game room and additional offices for Counseling and Psychiatric Services (CAPS), Georgetown University’s mental health care provider.
Inside the Units
Standard units in Henle Village, which includes an ADA-accessible apartment on each floor, will accommodate four students, though select single-occupancy units will be available.
Nico Hohman, the director of construction at Georgetown who led the tour, said the complex stands out among other on-campus housing options for several reasons, namely its in-unit laundry facilities.
“The number-one requested thing for students to have inside their unit was a washer-dryer,” Hohman said during the tour. “So, every unit has in-unit washer-dryer. Some units are stackable. Some units are side by side.”
Most units house four students, with some two-bedroom, two-bathroom units and some four-bedroom, two-bathroom units. Each unit also contains a kitchen with a dining table, a living area with a couch and vanities in the bedrooms.
Hohman said student feedback requesting more privacy was incorporated into the complex’s community spaces and the units’ layouts.
“We wanted to provide some privacy, but also community space,” Hohman said. “And so, specifically in the standard units, you have the bedrooms on the opposite end, or the beds on the opposite end of the bedrooms, to kind of give that semi-private feeling. You could walk into your room and not see your roommate at all, but also still have the community living room, your living room, a kitchen here to share with your roommates.”
Henle and Neighborhood Life
Hohman said the Henle Village project stemmed from the university’s participation in the Georgetown Community Partnership (GCP), a forum between the university and neighborhood community members.
“One of the things of the university being a part of that is we want to be a good neighbor, and part of that is understanding that the neighborhood prefers when students are on campus,” Hohman said. “The university just didn’t have enough physical beds to be able to house all students on campus.”
According to Hohman, the university has specifically targeted seniors to live in the Henle Village instead of in the Georgetown neighborhood, Burleith and Rosslyn.
“The idea was to attract seniors back on campus,” Hohman told The Hoya. “So you’ll see that this is meant to be upper class and housing apartment style living, and also meant to be a student gathering space here on the north side of campus.”
“The product that we had to provide to seniors really had to showcase, ‘Hey, this is something unique, this is something special,’ to really attract that interest,” Hohman added. “And so that’s why it looks a lot different than anything you see on campus. It looks more like a market-rate apartment.”
Hohman said that upon completion of the Henle project, GU Hotel will not be available for student housing for the 2025-26 academic year as the building transitions back into a hotel.
“Come August 2025 when fall move-in happens, this Henle village will be available for that, and then the hotel will be actually put back into service as a hotel,” Hohman said. “Capital Projects has another project to put the hotel back as a hotel.”
Sustainability Practices
Hohman said the university has prioritized sustainability throughout the Henle Village reconstruction efforts.
“While students might not necessarily be able to see some of the most sustainable features — the solar panels are big, windows are big — but how the building functions from a mechanical, electrical, plumbing perspective, that’s really where we see a lot of the sustainability points in that,” Hohman said.
“And then also from the construction perspective too — when we demolished the old Henle village, we recycled every bit of material that we could,” he added.
According to Hohman, the complex — which features a green wall on the ground floor and planters in its outdoor spaces — earned a platinum sustainability rating, the highest sustainability designation a building can earn.
Hohman said his team prioritized minimizing the amount of demolition going to landfills in the construction process.
“It wasn’t just demolish it, put it in landfills,” Hohman said. “It was demolish, separate steel, separate concrete, separate wood, separate plastics. And so that way in the demolition process, as little went to landfill as possible.”