McDonogh School

St. John Student Center

OWINGS MILLS, MD | 2014

The St. John Student Center, which opened in December 2014, was designed to serve as the hub of campus activity with dining, teaching, and meeting spaces. The center provides several areas for comfortable dining, allowing students to enjoy snacks or meals at their convenience. The main dining space, a 500-seat formal dining hall, is equipped with collapsing walls to provide flexibility and division of the space when needed in partnership with Bowie Gridley and Design Collaborative, Thos. Moser was sourced initially to create a multipurpose boardroom table, leading to further collaboration, including custom-designed handmade wooden furniture, 120 tables, and 730 chairs for the main dining room. The main objective of the dining hall design was to create a formal dining room with traditional appeal that could serve various functions—from daily meals to special events such as weddings, fundraisers, or galas. To accommodate the room’s many different uses, Thos. Moser worked with the building architect and school personnel to design custom solutions. The tables were created to be collapsible with removable tops and nesting bases. The chairs were specially designed to stack with ease, sliding neatly on top of each other to save space. Each chair was also laser engraved with the school’s official seal on the crest rail. All furniture was made from American Red Oak to match the building’s interior finishes.