SUNDERLAND — After three site visits, the South County Senior Center Board of Oversight and its director sat down with architecture firm edmStudio to lay out their desires for a future home for the Senior Center.

The Board of Oversight, Director Jennifer Remillard and edmStudio Associate Principal Chris Wante toured the South Deerfield Congregational Church, the Whately Town Offices and the former Sinauer Associastes/Oxford University Press building at 23 Plumtree Road on Tuesday to get a first-hand look at potential homes for the center.

Then, back at the center’s administrative building in Sunderland, the Board of Oversight and Remillard sat down with Wante and Architect Doug Gallow to lay out their wants and needs for the Senior Center, which will then help the edmStudio team create a feasibility study and a general idea of the costs required to make the center become a reality.

“We’re trying to home in, we’re not going to get every square inch in this study,” Gallow said. Wante noted that there “might be some differences with what we can and can’t do” with each of the three sites being considered.

The feasibility study is funded by a $75,000 Efficiency and Regionalization grant from December 2022, which now expires at the end of the calendar year after Deerfield, the center’s fiduciary agent, received an extension to spend the money.

Discussions on finding a home for the center have dragged on for years and the South Deerfield Congregational Church, at least for the town of Deerfield, is considered the top candidate. Tilton Library is currently making use of the church’s renovated function hall while its expansion project is underway.

Among the highest priorities for a senior center is a dedicated space for fitness classes, separate staff offices, an office for nursing staff and a sort of auditorium-like space for demonstrations, lectures, movies or other similar programming. That space, the Board of Oversight added, doesn’t have to be a large auditorium, but rather an intimate 75-seat space that can be used for multiple purposes.

The key to these desires is attracting more folks to the Senior Center, particularly adults who are over 55 years old and still working. Gallow said effective use of space can help make up for small square footage and it’s about “understanding what your limitations are.”

“The size of your center doesn’t correspond with the size of your community,” Gallow said. “If you expand your hours, you’ve made your senior center bigger.”

Another point he emphasized was to avoid doubling up on resources that are already available nearby. The auditorium/meeting room doesn’t have to be a large space for huge presentations because Frontier Regional School’s auditorium is already a resource for its member towns.

“If we had a central space all three towns could use, that brings us closer together,” added Deerfield Selectboard and Board of Oversight member Trevor McDaniel. “People buy into that.”

As the board went over other needs, such as a kitchen, McDaniel cautioned them from dreaming too big, because, at the end of the day, the towns need to be able to pay for a project.

“I want to make this attainable,” he said. “That’s the biggest thing of this whole project; I want to get it done.”

Chris Larabee can be reached at clarabee@recorder.com.