A Good Win
For weeks now, I’ve been following the news about a prominent San Francisco fountain that, until recently, seemed on the express train to oblivion. It’s a tale of a changing cityscape and the desire of a company known for rigidly controlling its visual image to remake a retail space in a way that suited its corporate design sensibilities.   It’s the story of an artist who recently passed away – one who spent her early years confined in
#7: Beach Entry
I know they’ve been around for quite a while, but in our marketplace, beach entries are the latest thing these days – maybe hotter than ever before. The enthusiasm makes sense:  Beach entries give bathers a way to dip into the water and take up a spot in the pool or on a lounge chair without making a full commitment to getting soaked.  Better yet, we get a lot of sun in Texas, and these spaces can easily be rigged with umbrella stanchions – a cool
Test Your Knowledge #64
Next: Diana Nyad to Swim 48 Hours for a Good Cause
Setting the Wall
  The key to good pond-filter/waterfall installation is making certain the area around the unit is well compacted, well supported and properly positioned.  If you take care of all of those things, the system that drives the pond will be stable and offer trouble-free performance for many years to come. In this video, we look with special focus at one of the support systems we see as crucial to many of our successes – that is, a good retaining wall that will help keep
Ripples #74
Compiled and written by Lenny Giteck Are We in a New Golden Age Of Aquatic Entertainment?
Driving Home
It’s not often that a watershaper tackles a job that takes more than two years of complete, full-time effort, but that’s been the case for the project pictured here.  For nearly two and a half years, in fact, I devoted virtually all of my working life to this single backyard watershape environment, and as I’ve mentioned in previous articles, there were times when I wondered if I was crazy to get involved with a project of this scope. Indeed, to describe it simply as a “backyard watershape environment” is to fall miles short of conveying the complexity of the systems covered in two previous WaterShapes articles (“When Dreams Grow,” April 2008, click here; and “Layering the Experience,” July 2008, click here):  It was a monster project, and there were times I thought the beast had me at a distinct disadvantage. You know all about that, of course, if you’ve followed this sequence of articles, so I won’t belabor the point.  Here, we’ll wrap things up by letting the photographs tell most of the story – although I must say the images don’t quite
Test Your Knowledge #63
Woman Breastfeeding in U.K. Public Pool Ordered to Stop
Preparing the Filter
The video linked below covers one of the many phases of a pond-installation project that can seem less critical than it really is. As I mention there, homeowners in particular tend to look at plumbing of the filter as pretty much the equivalent of working on the sprinklers – and they’re not far off, practically speaking.  But the difference
Pivot Points
This has been a summer I won’t soon forget, personally or professionally. On the former side, it started wondrously with the birth of my first grandchild, which came shortly before I helped my oldest daughter, her husband and the new baby move houses (an adventure that sent me to the hospital with a severely strained back).  It continued with my youngest daughter’s completion of her undergraduate studies, her grand tour of Europe and her start in medical
Sanitizing System ABCs
Of all the decisions related to swimming pool projects, the one that tends to be the most difficult for average consumers to wrap their minds around has to do with selecting the sanitizing system.  And that’s with good reason, because water treatment is a complex, science-laden topic that can involve a lifetime of study. As a result, I figured that a simple, direct approach would be best in