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Ripples #35

Compiled and Written by Lenny Giteck Ellen and Spouse’s Pool Estate On the Market for $49 Million Popular daytime talk show host Ellen DeGeneres and her spouse, actress Portia De Rossi, want to sell their Beverly Hills swimming pool — plus the enormous compound that surrounds it — for a cool $49 million. Even at that price,

All Things Considered

I’ve spent 50 of my years living in Southern California – an exhilarating half-century in which I’ve spent a lot of time, man and boy, in the presence of watershapes of various forms and sizes. The experiences I’ve had have filled me with opinions about the nature of these bodies of water and their accoutrements, so

Exotic Inspiration

This is a rather unusual Travelogue: I’d sat down to write a blog about the influence of hotel and resort pools on the way homeowners develop expectations of what can be done in their own backyards, and I recognized almost immediately that

Custom Pools or Aquatic Art?

Almost every advertisement for watershapes I’ve ever seen in a newspaper or the Yellow Pages says something about “custom” this or “custom” that. It always leads me to wonder how to differentiate between the “custom,” “high-end” and “luxury” pools others devise and the “architectural pools” or, better yet, the “aquatic art” I strive to create. I prefer the last two terms because

Getting Ready to Design a Pool

In my recent series on exterior design, I made only brief reference to the inclusion of pools and other aquatic features as part of outdoor compositions. I’ll make up for that now with a series of three features on approaching the design of watershapes. In most cases, a swimming pool is the biggest investment my clients will make in developing their exterior spaces. Indeed, the cost of the pool itself

Test Your Knowledge #23

NASA to Rent Out AstronautTraining Pool to Oil Company

Reading the Tea Leaves

In his year-end column five years ago, Brian Van Bower began by addressing the need every businessperson has to step back periodically and evaluate ‘where you fit within your corner of the industry.’ ‘To me,’ he continued, ‘understanding the Big Picture is a practical necessity, because failing to do so means I’m almost certain to miss opportunities and, just as bad, will not be prepared for conditions in the market that influence

Ripples #34

Ripples is compiled and written by Lenny Giteck .The Top 10 Ripples Stories of 2011 Given that approximately 125 items appeared in Ripples in 2011, choosing the top 10 is no easy task. Obviously, this is a matter of personal taste…in which case, legendary (in his own mind) Ripples expert Lenny Giteck gets to pick. And the winners are…

The Spirit of the Season

I’ve always been a Christmas junkie. I grew up with two brothers and three sisters (I was fifth in line), and with so many people involved, the activity level in our household started building with Thanksgiving and didn’t really calm down until sometime after January 1. One of my fondest memories is of the first year in which