This weekend Provost Biddy Martin is moving to Madison, Wisconsin, a typical college town if there ever was one. But the University of Wisconsin’s new chancellor won’t exactly have to scrounge for housing, according to the Wisconsin State Journal.
She’ll live in Olin House (left), a 1912 red-brick stunner that’s just had a ten-month, $2.4 million make-over. (See more photos here .) The nine-bathroom mansion had rotting timbers, burst pipes, and crumbling masonry. For decades, cream wall-to-wall carpet covered the quarter-sawn oak flooring in the sunken living room.
And then there were the bats.
“It’s the only place I’ve ever lived in my life where we had to sleep with a fishnet by the bed to catch bats at night,” said outgoing chancellor John Wiley.
The renovation added an industrial kitchen, geothermal heating, and a speaker system. There’s even a new coat room to accommodate guests’ wraps.
Olin House is named for John Myers Olin (no relation to the John Olin who funded buildings at Cornell and other universities), who bequeathed it to UW in 1924. One hopes Martin will like the house — under the terms of Olin’s will, the chancellor must live there.
Martin starts her new job September 1.