Commentaries, Interviews & Profiles
An Interview by Lenny Giteck When Greg Wittstock built his first watergarden in his family's backyard at the ripe old age of 12, it was designed to provide a home for his pet turtles. Unfortunately, his treasured pets were not all that appreciative of a residence that leaked and had green water, so they fled the scene. He wound up ripping out and rebuilding the pond
An Interview by Lenny Giteck From a very young age, Steve Sandalis was fascinated by natural waterfeatures — an early interest that years later led him to found his watershaping company, Mystic Water Gardens. The Encino, Calif.-based business has prospered mainly by designing and building high-end waterfeatures for the wealthy elite of Los Angeles, including major figures in the entertainment industry. Many of Mystic's projects, which mostly come through word-of-mouth referrals, have carried six-figure price tags, including one that ran
An Interview by Lenny Giteck David Knox has spent much of his adult life analyzing and manipulating light. In 1983, he founded a company called Directed Light, which invented and produced laser systems for many of the nation's A-list technology outfits — including General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola and Boston Scientific. In 1998, he sold Directed Light to a larger Japanese firm. "I decided to sell the laser company for two reasons," he recalls. "One, I had reached my highest level of incompetence in terms of being a manager, and I really wasn't having a whole lot of
An Interview by Lenny Giteck Some the most iconic images of the past four decades have been photos of bikini-clad Playmates splashing around in the swimming pool or lounging in the adjoining grotto of the Playboy Mansion West, in the Holmby Hills area of Los Angeles. When Hugh Hefner purchased the 5.2-acre property in 1971, it included a staid, 29-room "Gothic-Tudor" house (as Forbes magazine described it). Through the years, however, the Playboy founder has invested a reported $15 million to transform the place into a
An Interview by Lenny Giteck Since 1971 when they jointly founded The Dirsmith Group, an architecture, landscaping and engineering firm headquartered in Highland Park, Ill., Ron and Suzanne Dirsmith have established a distinguished track record of designing imaginative structures and environments that often pay homage to the beauty of nature — particularly the element of water. In the late 1950s, just four years after completing his architecture and engineering studies, Ron became a Fellow in Architecture of the American Academy in Rome, a highly prestigious research and study center for
An Interview by Lenny Giteck Randy Beard, owner of Pure Water Pools in Costa Mesa, Calif., has never been short on ambition. At the ripe old age of 19, he and his then new bride, Martha, started Pure Water as a pool-cleaning company. ("Even after being married and working together all these years," he says, "Martha is still my best friend.") In the nearly three decades since then, Beard and his company have evolved from
An Interview by Lenny Giteck When, in the 1980s, Jack Beane began formulating potions designed to prevent pool finishes from becoming stained and to remediate those that were already damaged, it was not with the intention of creating a company to manufacture and market such products. He simply wanted to help friends and relatives who were experiencing difficulties with their backyard pools. "I was taking it one pool at a time in
An Interview by Lenny Giteck The path to extending the Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star certification program to the pool and spa industry was neither short nor smooth: It took the industry fully five years to convince Energy Star to certify variable-speed pumps. That important step began about a year ago, and now six manufacturers have earned certification for various energy-efficient pool-pump models. The Energy Star program was created in 1992. A joint effort by the EPA and the U.S. Department of Energy, it seeks to identify, certify and promote consumer products that are energy-efficient. In many cases, certified products consume up to a third less energy as compared to products that
Interview by Jim McCloskey When you ask David Tisherman what it takes to design at the highest levels, the answer comes back in a hurry: “Three things,” he says: “education, inspiration and travel.” The first two, he observes, come from hard work in classrooms; close observation of design precedent and the setting; and having an open, inquisitive mind when it comes to sizing up the client and the client’s capacity to get
Sustaining Sustainability