Old Mill Elementary
Old Mill Elementary in Bullit County, Kentucky. A large nature playground on the elementary campus to supplement the existing manufactured playground.
Old Mill Elementary, in Bullit County, Kentucky, is a new school on a large site in the heart of Bourbon Country. The school had installed a robust manufactured playground, and wanted to invest equally into the addition of an adjacent nature playground, giving the students a greater diversity of play options and more freedom in how they play. The CAPN was able to create a conceptual design that utilized large boulders excavated from the school construction, and worked closely with the contractor to execute these designs, which also featured accessible elements for children of all abilities.
The conceptual design used as many of the existing boulders as possible to create a variety of intriguing play features that utilized found materials.
The large size of the school property gave plenty of room for large play features and extensive obstacle courses.
The school’s site had a rolling hill that was ideal for creating large play features and elements built into the slope. The existing hill was utilized to help create the slide, rock wall, and sandpit. By terracing the sandpit into the hill, we were able to recreate our wheelchair-accessible sand-play feature from Bernheim, which allows users in wheelchairs to access the bottom of the sandpit and enjoy sand-play in the same space as their classmates. With the large site and scope of the project, the CAPN created phases of the design which could be executed gradually, as funding allowed. The boulder phase was the first to be completed.
