Cedar Rain Crest
About
- 01Eight rooms, no more.
- Janet Marsden bought the property in the spring of 2000, when it was still a working cedar-cutting operation. The main structure was a timber-frame house with no insulation worth mentioning and a well that ran slow in August. She spent the first two years doing the work herself, with help from a local builder she found through the Fredericksburg hardware store. The meditation pavilion went up in the winter of 2001, built from cedar salvaged from the original cutting operation. The first guests arrived in March of 2002, two women from San Antonio who had found a handwritten flyer at a yoga studio. They stayed four nights and came back the following autumn.
- 02Three dedicated practice spaces.
- The turning point came in the winter of 2008, when Janet closed the property for three months to rethink the program model. She had been running too many structured workshops, filling the calendar because she thought that was what a retreat center was supposed to do. She came back in spring 2009 with a simpler offer: fewer programs, longer stays, smaller groups. The writing retreat format came out of that period, as did the decision to cap the property at eight rooms permanently. That winter also produced the current trail system, which Janet laid out herself using her landscape design background, routing the paths around the spring-fed pond and through the oldest section of the cedar grove.