The Eldridge Hotel is closing next week for a $1.5 million makeover designed to give the downtown landmark building new life.

The historic hotel at 701 Mass. will shut down Monday for what is expected to be a three-month project to overhaul the building’s rooms, hallways, floors, restaurant, bar and anything else showing unwelcome signs of the structure’s considerable age.

The building, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, went up in 1912 and has gone through several incarnations — including a stint as an apartment building — before re-emerging as a hotel in the late 1980s.

“Anything ages, and the rooms have aged,” said Susan Chaney, part of the group that bought the building for $2.92 million at a bankruptcy auction in October. “Even if you’re staying in a historic hotel, you don’t want to feel like the room is an old hotel room. Our goal is to bring it up to the really wonderful, comfortable, high standards that you would find in some of the nicest hotels in the country. …

“We’re looking at a high-end makeover.”

The project will leave about 50 part-time employees out of work, along with a few of the Eldridge’s seven or eight full-time managers and other staffers, Chaney said. Displaced employees will be invited to reapply for jobs.

Owners expect to reopen the hotel no later than April 1. The Jayhawker bar will remain open through the initial phases of the project — “as long as possible,” Chaney said — but eventually will close for renovations of its own.

While many details of the project remain undetermined or undisclosed, Chaney said, several aspects are set in stone. Work on installation of a new elevator begins Monday, and all 48 hotel suites will get complete makeovers: new bathrooms, beds and floor coverings.

Even rooms’ historic names, such as the Phog Allen Suite, may be cast out the window.

“They’re completely new rooms, other than the same walls,” she said.

Shalor’s Restaurant will close for an overhaul, from the interior and kitchen design all the way down to a new menu and even a new name. The Jayhawker bar will be expanded into space that previously was occupied by an antique store, and likely will include a U-shaped bar.

Downstairs, the space that had been home to the Big Six sports bar and restaurant will play a major role in the business, Chaney said, but the precise use remains undecided.

“That will be the last question answered,” said Chaney, who recalls disco dancing on the basement’s lighted, raised dance floor as a Kansas University graduate in the late 1970s. “It’s a space that screams for something special.”

Largely left untouched will be the hotel’s Crystal Ballroom, home to corporate meetings, civic events and other special events. The project aims to restore the “fabulously unique, wonderful” aspects of the historic hotel, Chaney said.

Chaney moved into the hotel Oct. 13, the day after she and fellow investors submitted the top bid in U.S. Bankruptcy Court. The group’s members are Chaney and her husband, Mitchell Chaney, an attorney from Brownsville, Texas; Bobby Douglass, a Chicago businessman and former Kansas University and professional football player; and a handful of local investors.

Among the members of the investment group are individuals affiliated with the renovation project’s primary contractors: Gene Fritzel Construction Co. Inc. and Joel Fritzel Construction, both based in Lawrence. David Longhurst, a former Lawrence mayor, is serving as the hotel’s interim general manager and is among the investors.

While many project details remain undecided, Susan Chaney said, the group is poised to spend at least $1.5 million to elevate the hotel to its anticipated “four-star” status.

“This is what needed to happen,” Chaney said, “and I think everybody knows that.”