OUR DESIGN PROCESS
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The community dreams first.
Then we help turn that dream into a plan.
For decades, we have helped communities bring their visions to life through a proven process of deep listening and collaboration. With guidance from a Nature Sacred Design Advisor, a landscape architect or designer versed in our community-centered design process, we support communities as they transform their ideas into thoughtful, actionable designs that reflect their values and aspirations. We are at the table from the first conversation, and we stay long after the design is delivered: through construction, through the opening, and through the seasons that follow, as the community grows into the place it made.
Garden of Peace and Remembrance
Falls Church, VA
From first conversation to opening day.
Every Sacred Place moves through the same four phases. The pace and the particulars belong to the community.
Nature Sacred Assigns a Design Advisor & Onboards a Firesoul™
Our design advisors are landscape architects and designers who are also experts on the Nature Sacred community-centered design process. If a Firesoul has not already been identified by the community, Nature Sacred works with the community to choose one.
Establish a Sacred Place Steering Committee (SPSC)
The SPSC is comprised of representatives of the community and assists the Firesoul in engaging the community and ensuring that the final Sacred Place meets their shared vision, construction budget and maintenance capacity.
“Positive energy abounded and I’m so grateful that everyone contributed to help frame the garden’s mission and what we hope to accomplish. I’m already looking forward to the steps ahead! If today’s meeting was the seed, our harvest should be abundant!”
Every Sacred Place shares five elements.
A portal, a path, a destination and a surround. How each one is articulated — what the portal is made of, where the path bends, what the destination holds — is what the community decides through the four phases above. The fifth element never changes.
Portal
- What it is
- An entry marker such as an archway, gate, pergola, trellis, or a distinct stand of trees.
- Purpose
- It marks a clear physical and psychological transition from the stress and rush of everyday life into a calm, reflective space.
WHO'S AT THE TABLE
The Community
The people who will use the place decide what it needs to be. Everything else follows from that.
The Firesoul
The local champion who convenes neighbors, carries the vision, and tends the place long after opening day.
The Steering Committee
Community representatives who keep the design honest to the shared vision, the budget, and what can be maintained.
The Design Advisor
A landscape architect or designer, assigned by Nature Sacred, who translates what the community wants into a plan that can be constructed.
And Nature Sacred, throughout
We are at the table from the first conversation, and we stay after the last one. We convene the workshops, assign and pay the Design Advisor, remain through construction and the grand opening, and keep company with the Firesoul for as long as the place stands.
WHAT WE BRING
The long arc of support
Alongside the design work, we stay with the Firesoul — through the meetings that go long, the funding that takes another year, the seasons when the place needs tending and no one is watching. We answer the call, make the introduction, sit in on the difficult conversation.
It is not consulting, and it is not grantmaking. There is no ready category for it. What we can say is that we lead with joy, and that Firesouls tell us it is the part they did not expect and would not give up.
PROVENANCE OF THE PROCESS
30 years of practice
Our design process wasn't drawn up at a desk. It took shape over thirty years, in the field, alongside the communities we work with. Each Sacred Place taught us something the last one couldn't, and we carried those lessons into the next. What began as a few convictions about nature and belonging became a practice: tested in real places, with real people, and honed with every one we built.
So the elements you'll find in a Sacred Place, the bench, the Little Yellow Journal, the way a path draws you in, aren't stylistic choices. Each one earned its place by proving, over years of listening, that it helps a person feel calm, welcome, and at home. The process is still evolving. Every place we create teaches us how to make the next one better.
Every place on the map began with a community and a first conversation.