La Jolla Country Day School has spent the past five years demolishing its 1960s buildings, living out of portable classrooms and building four distinct campuses for its preschool, elementary, middle and high schools to the tune of $46 million. In the redesign, the private school also built a $10 million visual arts and science building and a $12 million library, plus put down new tennis courts, fields and lights for $3.6 million. Architectural design, as well as technological advancement, has driven much of the redesign in an attempt to create a unique sense of space — and essentially a separate school — for each grade level on the 24-acre campus. The idea was to create a sense of transition, while maintaining some consistency in the design for the school’s 1,079 students as they move from grade to grade since it’s unusual to educate students ages 3 to 18, explained Chris Lavine, director of communications and marketing. Three architect firms were involved in crafting the look for each campus, and Bilbro Construction Company, based in Mission Valley, built the new structures as the general contractor. Building up The kindergarten was the last phase of the five-year project designed by downtown-based Davy Architecture. Kindergarten students attend a self-enclosed “village” of four classrooms that resemble a cluster of small houses with overhanging roofs and tiny flowerpots outside. Each classroom has its own backyard where the children are experimenting with growing plants in raised beds. “The genesis for the design was to create a little village of cottages, thinking that when you’re first starting out in school it’s a big step,” said Rick Davy, lead architect for the project with Davy Architecture downtown. “To ease the transition between home and school was to make school a little bit like home.” The kindergarten world is self-enclosed; the children share a sandy playground within their fenced area, they use bathrooms in the classroom and lunch is delivered to their neck of the campus. The preschool nearby is similar, on a smaller scale, with tiny toys, a tiny bridge leading into the classroom and tiny chairs. The classroom ceilings sport patterns of train tracks, leaves and paw prints for visual enjoyment when the preschoolers lie horizontal for their naps. La Jolla Country Day invested enough architectural thought into conserving energy in the kindergarten village that it plans to certify its efforts through Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) at the gold level. Davy Architecture insulated the walls, installed energy-efficient appliances and created a succulent garden nearby to teach students about the native, drought-tolerant plants. Sunroofs contribute to the children’s wellbeing as much as to the environment by providing natural lighting through a translucent window that prevents glare. “Throughout the years, architects have learned that there are a few things that make for good, wholesome, positive environments and there are a few things that don’t — like cold, dark places without windows,” Davy said. All students from tots to seniors share the architectural and pivotal mother ship of the campus: the library, designed by downtown-based Ferguson Pape Baldwin Architects. The three-story wall of slanted windows — a perpetual reflective eye — provides each floor with a sun-drenched reading room for each grade level. The entrance to the library is grand with tall ceilings, a gallery of artwork and a baby grand piano in the corner that students are free to play at whim. “You can definitely find our art facilities now,” said Mark Marcus, assistant head of school for operations. “Before they were hidden so far away you would never know they existed. You can also find the space for the library, which was small before and inadequate, and now we’re in a facility that is serving the students the way they should be served.” Student life continues in leaps and bounds from the cottage existence of kindergarten to the blocky middle school campus wrapped around a grassy quadrangle to denote a collegiate atmosphere, also designed by Ferguson Pape Baldwin Architects. Architect Carrier Johnson designed the Visual Arts and Science building, which features spacious art rooms and functional labs. The separation between the schools has also made drop-off and pick-up for parents more manageable, since parents collect their children from separate parking lots and head for individual administrative buildings for each grade level. “I think it’s a terrific improvement to the school to give the teachers the tools and facilities to do the type of academic learning that we need to have take place on this campus,” Marcus said.