Most striking feature is an ancillary ‘coffee house’ or café off one side of the main lobby where patrons will be able to purchase refreshments and read or converse. The effect will be a combination of an old village gathering place and the current practice of having snack bars in commercial bookstores.

The facility at the library will have an outdoor terrace for use in season and there will be sheltered colonnade running between it and the library proper. Both will open onto a grassy slope to be known as ‘the Great Lawn’. The linked structures are to be of stucco and fieldstone with profuse use of glass.

The library itself will be state-of-the-art, combining the traditional collection of books with material in other media. There will be separate reading and activity areas for young children, teens and adults. Also planned are several community meeting rooms.

In keeping with the desire to promote a comfortable and unhurried feel, there will be a working fireplace in a reading area near the circulation desk – albeit, most likely a gas-fueled one.

The overall effect, according to Councilman Robert Weiner, in whose Second District the facility is to be built, will be as if "they restored the remnants of an old Brandywine Hundred farmhouse and put up a modern building beside it." That holds some similarity to an earlier proposal by County Executive Thomas Gordon to link the library with the historic barn at the Blue Ball intersection along Concord Pike.

First public presentation of design plans for the Talley-Day library will be at a community meeting on May 18 in the county building near the Naamans and Shipley Roads entrance to Brandywine Town Center. The meeting is to begin at 7 p.m.

Also to be presented then is the plan for completing the active recreational component of the park.

Delaforum has learned in advance of that session that the Hillier Group, an architectural firm based in Princeton, N.J., is being credited by those who have seen the plans with fulfilling the Gordon administration’s mandate that it come up with a functional library which has neither a classical library appearance nor an institutional look.

"The architect has done an admirable job, within budget, to make the library attractive and user-friendly," Weiner said. "There is a symbiotic relationship between the library design and the park. They are inextricably intertwined with a multitude of cross uses."

The library is budgeted to cost just over $10 million, with county, state and privately raised money involved. Friends of the Concord Pike Library has initiated the private drive, which seeks to raise about $3 million.

There is no specific construction timetable, but Gordon has promised completion during the fiscal year which ends June 30, 2004.

The new library – officially designated the Northern Regional Library although the bulk of its patronage is expected to come from Brandywine Hundred – is to replace the overcrowded and outmoded Concord Pike Library at Talleyville.

Plans call for both buildings to be on two floors, although a sloped roof will give the appearance they are not that tall.

A 200-feet-deep parking lot will separate them from Foulk Road. Clumps of trees will buffer the lot from Foulk Road and adjacent Foulk Manor North retirement home. There also will be a tree buffer between the library and parking lot and the park’s recreation area.

If the trees are hardwoods, as is currently planned, the library building apparently will be fully visible from outside the park only during the winter.

It has not yet been determined what to do with the former Talley residence, an actual farmhouse, which sits just southeast of the library site.

The recreational area – to be known as the Cloutier Complex at Talley-Day Park, after the late Philip Cloutier, who was a civic leader, County Council president and state legislator – will significantly enlarge the present area, it was learned.

In addition to two soccer fields and two softball diamonds presently there, the county will add three basketball courts, two tennis courts, a baseball diamond and an area for shuffleboard. Also planned as a so-called ‘bark park’ where unleashed dogs will be allowed to be exercised.

There is to be a network of walking and jogging paths, instead of a single route as exists in other county parks.

There will be parking along a loop road through the area. The road will be accessible only from the Foulk Road side of the park. A large buffer area is to separate the recreation area from the community of Nordic Dell.

It could not be immediately learned how much is budgeted for the recreational component. Construction is expected to begin this summer with completion to take about a year. Which, if any, of the facilities may be ready earlier also could not be learned.