Charlie’s Bridge: A Story of Perseverance

The moment he saw the real estate listing, Charlie Nguyen was intrigued by the singular estate in Los Gatos — home to Kotani-En, a century-old Japanese garden that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. He also knew right away that the bridge near the entrance, which provided access to the property over a creek, needed to be replaced. (Nguyen gestures to a pile of rotted wood from the old bridge to emphasize this notion.)

Once his offer on the place was accepted, he hired a contractor to rebuild the bridge in 2018. “The guy said, ‘No problem — I can do this for you,’” Nguyen recalls. “I know nothing about construction and thought it was a simple thing.”

By early 2022, however, the project had come to a standstill. “It was going nowhere,” he continues. “So I called Paul and asked, ‘Can you help me out?’ He said, ‘Yeah, we can take care of it.’ And he brought in the right people to do it.”

The Paul that Nguyen is referring to is Paul Conrado, founder of Conrado Home Builders, which had been enlisted to renovate the 1940s house at the site. By this time, a Japanese carpenter had spent eight months restoring the shrine and teahouse on the grounds; remarkably, both structures are made with only joinery and no nails.

Although Conrado Home Builders had never tackled a bridge before, Paul was eager to assist. “I started putting the pieces together to get his bridge designed and built,” he says. Among his earliest tasks was lining up a structural engineer; soil and civil engineers were already attached to the project.

Paul’s own background as a civil engineer proved invaluable. It was his idea to limit the bridge to traffic in one direction, which was key because there is no room for vehicles to pass one another nor for a fire truck turnaround. He was also instrumental in the design approval, as the structural engineer initially wanted 18-foot-deep hand-dug piers, which would have meant “a person is in a hole, putting dirt in a bucket and you’re lifting it out,” explains Colleen Conrado Ferguson, the firm’s president. Conrado deemed that proposed process too dangerous and too costly, and the structural engineer ultimately concurred.

The overriding thing is perseverance. ‘Find a way’ is one of the tenets that we run this business by.

The solution: New piers were added to the existing ones. If the latter were removed, “basically, the walls of the creek would collapse,” Colleen notes. Since there are no existing plans available to confirm the depth of the old piers, the company employed “a special technique using sound waves to determine how deep the existing piers are,” Paul says. “We’d never done that before.”

Indeed, the project entailed quite a few firsts. The effort to execute a safe structure that met current codes involved several agencies. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers mandated that work could only be completed between April 15 and October 15, with a wildlife survey conducted beforehand. Meanwhile, state fire regulations required that the new bridge could accommodate a 75,000-pound fire truck.

In May 2023, the County of Santa Clara issued a permit for the steel and concrete bridge. During the construction phase of the bridge, there were logistical challenges to contend with as well. Case in point: The subcontractors, such as the concrete and steel companies, performed test runs with their trucks to ensure that they could navigate the narrow and winding road leading to the bridge.

The bridge is a testament to “how complicated small things can be,” Colleen says. “It took the most experienced people in the room to solve the problems.” Even with all of its complexities and unprecedented challenges, giving up was never an option. According to Colleen, “the overriding thing here — for us and for Charlie — is perseverance. ‘Find a way’ is one of the tenets that we run this business by. We made a commitment to help him get his bridge built and we found a way.”