Get ready to explore San Diego! Open House San Diego – OHSD2022, hosted by the San Diego Architectural Foundation, is happening March 18-20. Guided and self-guided tours across 7 San Diego neighborhoods will give you the chance to have a thorough look at our city’s public spaces and architecture.
Hubbell & Hubbell will be giving tours at Briercrest Park, a project that our studio and James Hubbell studio worked on together, on Sunday. Sign up for the OH! tours here!

History of Briercrest Park

In 2005, landscape architects Schmidt Design Group designed Briercrest Park located near the Grossmont Healthcare Center in La Mesa. They teamed with Hubbell and Hubbell Architects to design custom elements. The Park offers hospital patients and assisted living residents a place of healing, restoration, beauty, education, and recreation. Greeted by a large butterfly-shaped mosaic created by James Hubbell Studios at the park entry, visitors are able to explore fragrant contoured gardens with undulating hills, rock terraces, and winding bridged paths. A 4.2 acre-oasis in an urban environment, Briercrest Park’s landscaping is designed to channel storm water and irrigation runoff into the central wetlands plaza, where turf mounds emerge and ripple throughout the park.

Integrating the one-of-a-kind comfort station and restroom, Hubbell and Hubbell Architects was tasked with the design of this structure to blend into the whimsical landscaping. Walking past the structure draws the eye to the flowing colorful mosaic. Not only does the structure blend in with the landscape surrounding it, it maintains its functionality with its masonry walls, natural daylighting and ventilation, shaded and landscaped entry area, and private unisex room and storage room, as well as featuring James Hubbell Studios’ stained glass windows.

Wandering further along the path, resembling a dry cobbled stream-bed, visitors are led to garden nooks including an herb garden and an interactive music garden. Children can discover play areas with a frog throne, art seating walls with tiles created by local schoolchildren, a winding Hubbell labyrinth, and a large stone climbing wall. California-native plants and landscaping with drought tolerant plant species embody the park’s focus on water conservation. The grouping of some of these species create the garden nodes, some managed by volunteers, and they are scattered strategically throughout the landscape to bring the visitors a variety of sensory experiences.

Briercrest Park has been awarded the Merit Award, American Society of Landscape Architects, San Diego Chapter; the Orchid Award, Orchids and Onions Public Awareness Program; and the Project of the Year, American Public Works Association, San Diego and Imperial Counties Chapter.

Come and see Briercrest Park for yourself!

To learn more about the park, visit our website link here.

Photo Credit: Brady Architectural Photography