ASLA Texas Chapter Honor Award

Located on the Memorial Hermann Southwest campus in Houston, Texas, Memorial Hermann Wellness Center is an innovative, two level fitness center with a versatile courtyard designed to facilitate the healing environment and experience. Here, a relaxing atmosphere for outdoor dining, contemplation, and communion is created through a series of outdoor spaces.

Whether experienced visually or physically, the garden is meant to both inspire and calm patients, distracting them from their illnesses and providing them with a non-institutional environment to reassure and comfort them.

At one end, a beautiful wooden arbor provides shade for an intimate dining terrace paved with a richly colored stone that gives warmth to the space. In the center can be found an activity lawn designed for movement exercise programs such as Tai Chi and Yoga. Defining this space is a path of Indian Red flagstone and a border of perennials designed to tickle the senses. Opposite the arbor, and within a grove of Drake elms, a meditative labyrinth comprised of granite gravel, stone boulders, and seasonal groundcovers provides a terminus for the garden.