Northwood School

Northwood School is a private boarding school for grades 9-12 located on a beautiful campus in Lake Placid that provides a unique learning environment in a natural and wooded setting. The campus had fallen into disrepair over the years and VIP was hired to evaluate the campus and create a master plan to bring the campus into the 21st century. Over the course of 17 years, VIP provided design-build services to implement the plan through a series of 75 projects including upgrades to classrooms, dormitories, athletic complex, auditorium, student activity centers, and maintenance centers.

Creating a Pedestrian Friendly Environment: A new pedestrian way and vehicular circulation roads that connected to the village were critical components of the master plan. The main pedestrian pathway had a grade of 7.5% grade and required thoughtful design and the strategic removal of trees to create safe and efficient walking trails, parking and traffic flow.

New Classroom Buildings: The VIP team designed and constructed two classroom buildings. In the design of the classroom buildings, our team detailed the framing so that we could use panelized construction if needed. Due to the small scale of the project the benefits were limited so the opportunity wasn’t pursued further.

Concepts for Faculty Apartments in the Woods: The school’s faculty resides in the dormitory with the students. VIP developed conceptual designs that created faculty apartments set in the campus’ wooded environment.
Facility Upgrades: Renovations included work in the dormitory, classrooms, auditorium, and fitness center where we built a rock-climbing wall.