The youngest learners at York House School will graduate in 2040. Rachel Hughes, Principal of the Junior School, thinks about that often.
York House School was founded in Vancouver in 1932 by seven women who believed girls deserved the same opportunities as anyone else. The school keeps returning to a question every educator is asking today: are we preparing students for where the world is going, or only for where it is now?
That question became the Spark Plan, York House School’s strategic vision for redefining education. For Rachel, it also became something more immediate: making sure the youngest Yorkies love learning along the way.
A School Inspired by the Reggio Emilia Approach
York House School has never mistaken busyness for learning. Its culture has always emphasized relationships, curiosity, and purpose beyond the individual, or, said in their words, Not for Ourselves Alone. That same spirit shapes the Junior School’s Reggio Emilia-Inspired Approach: inquiry-based, student-driven, and deeply interactive, with the environment treated as an active participant in learning and children trusted as capable and competent thinkers.
Joy isn’t a soft goal here. It’s the condition that makes everything else possible.
“My goals are to implement the strategic plan in a way that honors our history while taking us forward,” Rachel says. “But if I think about the bigger goal, it’s to foster a sense of joy. School should be fun and engaging.”
Spaces That Do the Teaching
When York House renovated its Junior School as part of the Spark Plan, the goal was to be deeply intentional. The work brought together York House School, Natural Pod, and Jordana Burnes of Heritage Office Furnishings, a local workplace solutions dealer who facilitated the project. Together, they focused on a question that drives every one of Natural Pod’s conversations: what does this space need to do for its learners and educators?
In the Grade 1–3 classrooms, collaboration and connection were a core part of what already existed in the previous design. Natural Pod’s Reach™ Tables, which still remain in excellent, wobble-free shape today, have been anchoring these rooms for roughly a decade. Their large, wave-like surfaces bring learners together at varying heights and arrangements and confidently meet any task the day demands. The renovation’s job here wasn’t to reinvent what was working, but to build around it, adding more open-ended pieces that let the rooms keep responding to what the students needed.
Jen Sharpe, STEAM Coordinator for Kindergarten to Grade 3, describes what that flexibility makes possible: “When classroom furniture is flexible, the space can be responsive to students’ needs, inquiries, and ideas. Benches and shelves become tables, the Play Cube becomes a reading nook or a bear cave, and a Play Stand becomes a shadow puppet theater.”
The Imagine™ Play Cube, which can be found in the Grade 1 classrooms, has become a case study in open-ended design: educators and learners have used it in a number of creative ways, turning it into a cozy retreat with textiles and pillows, a bear-friendly getaway, or draping fabric to make it whatever the day needs.
“You have to let the children figure it out,” Rachel says. “They will always tell you what to do with it.”
Bringing the Outside In
York House’s Junior School building dates to the 1960s, but it has beautiful natural light and unobstructed sightlines to the landscaping outside. That connection to the natural world is something Rachel wants her learners to feel indoors.
She is deliberate about what fills the rooms. Many classrooms create visual noise with posters and saturated color; at York House School, the spaces are designed to highlight the thinking of the young learners, not decorate around it.
The chosen furnishings carry that intention into the room. The warm wood tones and iconic curves of the tables, benches, and shelving bring the natural world inside, complementing the light and landscape beyond the windows rather than competing with them.
A Partnership Built Over Time
York House School’s relationship with Natural Pod goes back more than a decade, predating both the Spark Plan renovation and Rachel’s arrival. The older Natural Pod pieces were still in excellent condition, so the decision was simple: keep what had held up and design around it.
By the time Rachel arrived, York House School was already working with Jordana and Heritage. Like Natural Pod, they worked to understand Rachel’s vision and the needs of the space’s educators and learners before any conversation turned to products.
What made the collaboration between York House School, Natural Pod, and Heritage Office Furnishings meaningful, Rachel reflects, was the nature of the conversations. Natural Pod and Heritage didn’t arrive with a catalog. “The conversations weren’t even really about furniture,” she says. “They were about space and children’s learning. They acted more like consultants, asking ‘What is possible in this space?’ rather than ‘How many tables do you need?'”
That same responsiveness showed up when Rachel came back from a trip to Reggio Emilia with a changed vision for how the cubbies should work. The team, including Natural Pod’s Director of Design, Allan, turned a tailored solution around quickly.
“The furniture is just the start of the conversation,” Roxanne, Natural Pod’s Solutions Partner, said. “It’s not the end, it’s the beginning, and we’re with our clients long after a finished classroom.”
The result: Grade 1–3 classrooms that opened in September 2025, furnished with collaborative tables and benches, multifunctional storage solutions, and imaginative elements like the Imagine™ Play Stand and Play Cube. Old and new Natural Pod pieces sit in conversation with each other, much like the meaningful connections York House School fosters among its learners.
Sustainability is one of six core values at York House School, echoed in Natural Pod’s B Corp™ certification and its own roots as a women-led BC company. Both speak to values that resonate with a school founded by seven women.
The Work Is Never Finished
Rachel’s father, a former principal, visited the new classrooms and noted the work on the walls looked unfinished next to the framed, polished displays he remembered from his own career. Rachel wasn’t concerned. “Dad, that is the whole point,” she told him.
At York House School, wonder is not a warm-up for learning. It is the learning. Rachel describes a group of children discovering a fallen tree after a storm, reaching instinctively for their sketchbooks, coming up with theories about how it fell. The curiosity was immediate, unscripted, entirely their own.
The renovated Grade 1–3 classrooms are not a finished product. They are an environment built for young learners who are, themselves, works in progress. Natural Pod has helped design that environment for more than a decade, most recently alongside Heritage Office Furnishings; not by arriving with answers, but by asking the right questions.
At York House School, those questions never really stop. That, too, is the whole point.
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