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St. Mary’s Academy is preparing to expand its downtown Portland campus onto a nearby city block that officials plan to purchase from a German company for $7.6 million.

Leaders of the all-female Catholic high school have long wanted to grow beyond their building on Southwest Fifth Avenue, so they jumped at the opportunity to buy a block kitty-corner to its campus, St. Mary’s spokeswoman Mary Ann Albright said. The block bordered by Southwest Sixth Avenue and Broadway, and Market and Clay streets has a building that formerly housed a U.S. Postal Service office.

“We can’t go up any higher and we’re taking up our whole block and we’d like to have more space,” she said. “When we were approached with this opportunity we were intrigued. It could be once in a lifetime that a block right across from our school comes up for sale.”

The property, northwest of the school, is owned by trading company Eridanus Warenhandelsgesellsch of Hamburg, Germany.

The Postal Service closed its post office in the University Station building on the property in January.

The transaction should be finalized in September, and St. Mary’s has hired Portland architecture firm GBD Architects Inc. to design a new building, Albright said.

GBD will work closely with St. Mary’s staff to assess the best use for the space before devising a design, she said. The school plans to use the building for additional classrooms and improved athletics and fine and performing arts space, Albright said.

“We want to be very thoughtful about how we use this space,” she said.

St. Mary’s has invested about $20 million since the mid-1990s to expand and renovate its building, which was constructed in 1940; however, enrollment is continuing to grow, Albright said. This fall, 675 students in ninth through 12th grades will attend the school, she said.

Construction of the new building could begin as soon as 2016, Albright said.