Seven Oaks School – Inspiring, engaging and nurturing young minds

By David Fox

The opportunity to lend my expertise to the Seven Oaks School redevelopment has led to one of my personal favourite projects in recent years.

Seven Oaks founder Bruce McIntyre, who became a good friend, had a vision to move the school from its original location in Opawa to a new location in Halswell. Four hectares of land in Halswell was chosen as the site for the school, and development began.

Taking inspiration from the most important recipients – the students – I spent a lot of time with Bruce and the planning team brainstorming the potential layout of the new site. Students gave us some fantastic ideas, such as a frog pond, chocolate fountain, nerf gun area, water slide with penguins and imagination station with stacks of Lego, I thought they had serious surveying and planning flair!

We weren’t able to implement all of the kids’ ideas, but we the school layout with the teachers input was kept firmly in mind.

Eight years after the original idea, the new site is officially open!

I received these gracious words from Bruce…

“David, I would like to thank you for the broad range of advice and skills that you provided us with to get our new Seven Oaks School up and running.

I described you to people as, “David Fox, our Specialist Generalist “. You helped facilitate discussions regarding the site layout and the overall development, the location of school buildings, the design and parameters for the school grounds.  You identified the location of the carpark, resolved traffic access issues to Murphys and Quaifes roads, and designed the location of the stormwater ponds and finally resolved issues with the Council regarding swales along the Quaifes Road boundary.

Thank you, we couldn’t have done this without you.”

To read more about the Seven Oaks redevelopment, view their website here: https://sevenoaks.school.nz/our-campus/