With support from builders and community, nuns' prayers nearly answered

By Kathleen Acuff, Town Crier Staff Writer

Sister Annuntiata, Mother Colette and architect Salvatore Caruso tour the nearly completed monestary.

The Poor Clares won’t be sliding down the hill now - thanks, they say, to answered prayers and a big boost from the community. Their old convent in Los Altos Hills was in danger of disappearing in the next mudslide, but now a new building is safely anchored in its stead.

Mark Powers coordinated the project for the sisters, acting as their financial advisor. Architect Salvatore Caruso of Design Corp. designed the structure to blend in with the original chapel and novitiate, creamy white in a landscape of soft greens with touches of blue and gray. To achieve this harmony, workers demolished 19,000 square feet of unsafe structures and replaced them with 13,000 square feet of safe space.

Although the new building occupies less space, it contains something the old facility lacked: room for the order to grow. The 16 nuns and three novices now living in the Immaculate Heart of Mary convent hope that the 24 new cells will soon be filled.

“Tomorrow will be fine,” said Mother Colette, with ready humor.

The walls still smell strongly of fresh paint. Expansive windows that Mother Maura calls “beautifully clear” frame views of trees and hills, the Bay and the cloister garden. A circular saw buzzes in the background - a sister is busy in the woodworking shop. The nuns made shutters from scrap plywood for the single window in each cell and built their own beds with leftover wood and nails they picked up after the builders had finished. They stuffed their own (extraordinarily hard) mattresses with straw.

They handled some of the construction jobs, too. Using an electric spade, they dug the 3-foot hole for the hand-hewn cross at the center of their garden. They pulled all the old wiring from the monastery walls themselves. With one of them stationed every 10 feet along the line, the sisters removed the last of the thick, black cabling, whose 150 feet weighed as much as a small car.

At the outset of the $3 million project, the nuns had only $500,000 to work with. Powers said last week that they have now raised all but $400,000 of the sum required to pay for the project in full. So many persons in the building trades donated material and labor that in-kind donations have amounted to $700,000, Powers said. He said that donations of “mostly small sums” have paid for $1.9 million of the work, but the nuns, who have no income but alms, have an urgent need for donations to repay the remaining debt.

The living quarters were completed by September, Caruso said, but the sisters could not move in until the day before Thanksgiving because a zoning ordinance required a pathway to be laid along the 1,800-foot front property line first. The nuns might not be in the building yet if John Albanese of the Joseph Albanese Co. had not “descended on the property with a virtual army of workers” and worked, pro bono, for six days, said Caruso. In addition, Bill Carino, the building inspector, and Angelica Herrera, the town planner, were “just wonderful,” doing everything they could to move the process along, he said. The rest of the work is on schedule for completion by Christmas, Powers said.

Interested persons can mail donations to the convent or drop them off at 28210 Natoma Road, Los Altos Hills, CA 94024. Checks should be made out to the Poor Clares. The sisters will reply with a letter that the donor can use for tax-credit purposes.