Grand Fork’s historic City Hall under reconstruction

The main floor reconstruction and renovation of Grand Fork’s historic City Hall is underway. — Photo courtesy Hatch Interior Design

Reconstruction and renovation of the main floor of Grand Fork’s historic City Hall is underway. Hil-Tech Contracting of Trail was recently awarded the $1.21 million contract.

The City Hall’s main floor was razed by fire in the fall of 2013. The heritage building was built as the city’s post office in 1911.

Here is Hatch Interior Design of Kelowna vision for the Grand Forks City Hall reconstruction project, “Grand Forks has recently re-branded, part of which is a modern black and white logo and sleek website. This helped to inform our material palette which consists of black and white carpet, wall finishes, countertops and ceilings. We introduced some wood tones in the public area flooring, reception desk and storage millwork throughout to warm things up. We also incorporated a tonne of glass for two reasons, a) to maintain the contemporary contrast to the historical elements and b) to allow some natural light to filter into the interior offices.

In the new layout we were able to emphasize the original columns, in need of some restoration, by leaving them as standalone pieces framing the reception desk from either point of entry. The reception desk is representative of both the contemporary and historic with clean, rectangular lines, locally manufactured black concrete work surfaces made from slag, a by-product of the smelting process (and found lying in huge piles where a copper smelting company was once located on the outskirts of the city), and digitally printed wood veneer with an image of post office pigeon holes like were used to sort mail in its time as a post office.”

The project is expected to be completed late fall of 2014.