Carondelet High School Meditation Garden
Concord, California
by Cristian Juarez, Project Manager
Carondelet High School is an all-girls private Catholic high school in Concord, California. It was founded in 1965 by the Sisters of Saint Joseph and currently enrolls about 800 students. They provide their students with a quality college-preparatory education.
Having a long and rich heritage along with an attractive campus, Carondelet High School wanted to update some of its grounds with a meditation garden. The goal was to provide the students with a tranquil setting where they could relax and meditate.
The school leaders contacted Cagwin & Dorward based on our reputation and briefly presented us with their idea and we concluded our meeting with a date to meet to discuss the details and let us see the property.
Before Photo of Project
Project Ideas
It’s not often we are asked to create a meditation garden, so our team went to work doing online research about meditation gardens and finding some visuals we could use when we met with the school leaders at Carondelet High School who were leading the project.
As always, with a talented team, we had many ideas. Now we needed to know from the school what they envisioned and what budget we would be working with to reach the goal.
Before Project
Before Project
Planning
Considering the budget, our team settled on three different designs that would fit within or close to their budget, all of which were warmly received by the school leaders.
Once we had the plan they loved and agreements in place, as project manager, I quickly began determining the resources, equipment, and the team needed to complete this project.
Idea Plan #1
Idea Plan #2
Project Challenges
We had two primary challenges.
The first challenge was that we had one week to complete the transformation.
The second challenge was the courtyard where this transformation would take place had only one way to access it coming and going and that was through a building hallway. This means everything from materials, plants, equipment, and people, had to go directly through this hallway.
This proved to be a lot of hard work on top of the looming deadline.
Project Development
The Results: Meditation Garden
