The library at the new Saint Gertrude High School (Photo by Tom Holdsworth)
Saint Gertrude High School students once again have a home to call their own.
Yet its swift opening is surprising to those involved; the $35 million school building opened a mere three years after initial firm interviews and students at the all-girls Catholic school moved from Richmond’s Museum District to the Benedictine Abbey campus off River Road in Goochland County, all amid the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I have a hard time still believing this as I say it, but from the time of our first meeting on this project to the time the last beam was erected was 13 months,” says Lori Garrett, president and senior principal of Glavé & Holmes Architecture. “Normally just the design time is 13 months.”
In addition to the inherent health concerns, the pandemic also threw the supply and cost of building materials into question. John Locher, principal owner of Taylor & Parrish Construction, says it quickly became apparent that steel, stucco and other materials needed to be purchased much earlier than usual. “If we had waited till final design to buy the materials,” he says, “we wouldn’t have gotten them in time, and this project would not be open yet and we would have spent $2 [million] to $3 million more.”
“It was a true partnership where everybody was looking out for everybody else,” Locher says. “We were all working together. I mean, you hear the word ‘team’ used a lot, but this truly was the smoothest team job I’ve ever been involved in.”
The result of this teamwork is a nearly 50,000-square-foot modernized Spanish mission-style school building with 18 classrooms across three floors for the school’s 215 students. Groundbreaking happened in April 2021, and the first full day of classes was held in August 2023.
With its elegant interior design and modern technological flourishes, the building feels more like a higher education setting than a secondary school facility (Glavé & Holmes has also designed several buildings at Christopher Newport University in Newport News).
Most high schools also don’t have a 113-foot-tall tower with three bells coated in 23-karat gold leaf, nor do they typically feature wood trusses built by Amish woodworkers in Pennsylvania or a coffee bar.
To make construction easier and cheaper, most buildings are also typically rectangular in shape, and so was the new Saint Gertrude — at first. But at a design meeting, the ideas of professionals, faculty, staff, parents, students and alumni and the limitations of the space led to a structure that is described by officials as five buildings in one. The concept is visible for now when viewing the school’s unfinished chapel, which is connected to the Great Hall.
The effect, Head of School Amy Pickral says, is that “the whole entry of [the school] is just a big hug when you walk in.” It’s in this “magnanimous” building — as Benedictine Schools of Richmond President Jesse Grapes puts it — that Saint Gertrude hopes to foster the next generation of faith-filled leaders. “I hope that that’s going to uplift our students, like, ‘I am somewhere great, so I should be someone great.’”
The students also influenced the design choices for their future school. In various exercises hosted by Glavé & Holmes, such as writing a love or breakup letter to their old school or asking a genie for three wishes, students said they wanted lots of natural light and spaces for community gathering and reflection, Garrett says. Perched on a bluff overlooking the James River and the World War II Veterans Memorial Bridge on State Route 288, the school offers plenty of each, inside and out.
By the second day of classes, many students had taken advantage of a cool August day to talk, eat lunch or reflect outside against a backdrop of trees that slope downward to the river. But perhaps the best view comes from the unfinished third floor, which will be home to physical and performing arts spaces. The panorama offered in one room even prompted a change in the layout, Garrett says, so that landscape painters can reference a bird’s-eye view of the river during class.
The impact of the new building has reverberated beyond the classroom walls. The project has been recognized by Learning by Design Magazine with its national Architectural and Interior Design Honor, Outstanding Project for New Construction. Closer to home, “our families are very rejuvenated in their pride for the school,“ Pickral notes.
“There was a lot of worry in the alumni group about the future of the school [during the pandemic],” Grapes says, “and so you went from this place of incredible worry to overwhelming enthusiasm. That type of emotional transition is powerful, and the building is kind of at the center of all that.”
