The upcoming $12 million project at the Hanover Inn has a number of intriguing aspects. The first detailed story about it appeared in the Valley News last week, and the news has been picked up by NECN and WCAX. The Dartmouth Real Estate Office is running the project but appears to have dropped its “projects” webpage.

This is the kind of project that planners have been thinking about for decades. According to Alex Hanson’s story in the Valley News, builders will erect 12,000 square feet of additions between the Inn and the Hopkins Center and over a portion of the existing terrace facing Wheelock Street.

The terrace will shrink; the existing parking garage under the terrace will expand by ten spaces, presumably beneath the Zahm Garden/Drake Room portion of the expansion; the Inn’s existing restaurants will be pulled from the bowels of the building to storefronts on both Main and Wheelock Streets, an excellent idea; and the existing upper-level conference rooms will be divided into guest rooms.

This part of the project, explained in last week’s Valley News story, is particularly interesting:

The renovation would create guest rooms where now there are offices and meeting space in the Lang Building — the brick building next to the inn on Main Street that houses The Gap. The inn and Lang are already linked by passageways, but the new project requires the building to be brought up to code. Building code doesn’t allow openings between buildings on separate lots, and the financing of the two buildings makes it impossible to combine the lots, college officials wrote in filings with the town.

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[Update 01.13.2013: Broken link to Globe replaced with link to NECN.]