ARTICLES Archives - Page 196 of 312

Conceived of as part of the home’s original design and construction, this stunning rectangular pool provided the watershaping team of William Bennett and Walter Williams with the opportunity to work closely with an architect at the top of his game. The resulting composition in concrete, glass, wood and water – set on a steep slope in a densely wooded area – made all participants to rise to the occasion with practical, cost-sensitive solutions.

Builder’s Pride

There’s no doubt about it: Projects in which watershapers participate from the start in the overall design of a custom residence offer rare opportunities for creative integration that don’t come along very often. That was just the positive situation we encountered here – and the results are among the finest we’ve ever achieved. The project was organized by Lewis Bloom of Bloom Builders (Bethesda, Md.). We at Alpine Pool & Design (Annandale, Va.) have had the privilege of collaborating with him often through the past 20 years and have enjoyed a wonderful working relationship every step of the way. In this case, we were asked to get involved with a spec house he wanted to build on a steeply sloping, heavily wooded lot overlooking the Potomac River as it passes through Bethesda. Heading the design team was a prominent local architect, Robert M. Gurney, who has earned a reputation for beautiful Contemporary approaches to both residential and commercial projects. More to the point, he’s also known for his ability to maximize connections between built spaces and the areas that surround them. Everything seemed to mesh, and we

Michael Nantz has built a reputation for success in design work across a range of styles and settings. Here in words and images, the Dallas-based watershape designer and builder leads us through a set of recent projects that put him to the test, forcing him to work with challenging sites and a more than a few quirky client requests – and, invariably, pushing him to balance his instincts against the needs of his projects in developing creative solutions.

Balancing Acts

Through the past few years, a number of my most interesting projects have been all about revising outdoor environments for upscale residential clients, generally with the thought in my mind of integrating exterior and interior spaces. That seems simple enough, but these tasks have frequently been complicated by unusual site features and the fact that what clients want at the outset isn’t exactly what the site seems to require. In a few of these situations, I’ve needed to reset the stage entirely by remodeling significant architectural elements of the house to fuse indoor and outdoor spaces; in others, I’ve had to revise and reconfigure everything on site except the house. As I roll through these various scenarios, the thought I always keep uppermost in mind has to do with making everything seem as though

Swimming to Longevity

Delivering the keynote address to the World Aquatic Health Conference in September 2008, Dr. Steven N. Blair asked a simple question: Does swimming reduce your risk of dying? As he stressed then and repeats in detail here, the answer is a resounding yes. Indeed, the findings he offers stand among the most compelling reasons ever offered to promote swimming and other forms of aquatic exercise to the general public. Medical science has long seen exercise as a crucial part of a healthy lifestyle. In fact, there’s an enormous amount of evidence about its health benefits – so much that the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services recently stepped up with its first-ever guidelines for physical activity. Lots of individuals, organizations and other entities have proclaimed the positive outcomes of exercise through the years, but never before had the U.S. government published an official set of guidelines. These government recommendations were largely the result of

Last year, the project team planning Canterbury High School’s new aquatic center brought in watershaper William Drakeley to discuss the facility’s state-of-the-art competition pool. Before he could start, however, questions about how it should be built involved Drakeley in educating the project team about the distinctions between shotcrete and cast-in-place concrete – and which should be used in creating what was to be a huge, monolithic shell.

Top of the Class

Every so often, our company is confronted by the belief among certain design professionals that, as it is used by the pool industry, shotcrete is simply not viable for use as structural concrete in high-profile watershaping projects. The assumption, I’ve learned, is that the pool industry is filled with contractors and specification writers who know little about the material and therefore tend to produce substandard results. I could argue the merits of the case, but let it suffice to say that the upshot of this widespread belief is that institutions and commercial clients hesitate to use shotcrete and instead prefer cast-in-place concrete, which they perceive as having greater quality and reliability in watershape applications. We at Drakeley Swimming Pool Co. (Bethlehem, Conn.) recently encountered exactly that prejudice: A private high school that was in the process of designing and building a state-of-the-art aquatic center and an

To Colorado pond/stream specialist Dave Garton, a certain ‘flexible responsiveness’ is the quality of utmost importance in all of his watershape designs. It’s an approach, he says, that calls for a keen understanding both of the setting and of what makes his clients tick – a dual awareness he puts on eloquent display here in discussing how he maximizes the personal appeal of his designs even as he works across a broad range of project types and styles.

Making Frames

Architectural Majesty

Earlier this year, I attended the Texas Pool & Spa Expo in Fort Worth – and, upon arrival, was treated to an unexpected earful. As soon as I reached the show floor, I walked over to greet my friends at the Genesis 3 booth. Before I could even get in a good round of “hellos,” David Tisherman asked me if I’d ever been to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth – just down the block from the Convention Center and practically in my own backyard. For those of you who know David, whether as an instructor or as a prolific writer for WaterShapes, I’m sure you can guess how he reacted when I confessed

Keeping Pace

From my perspective on the design and installation side, I see bringing landscape lighting to a property as a process that includes careful planning and execution as we compose the different scenes and lighting elements; count and select fixtures; lay out the power-distribution system; install everything properly; and, finally, fine-tune it all before turning things over to our clients. Looking at it from the other side, it’s been my observation that clients approach these projects with an equivalent level of deliberation: Even among relatively affluent clients, landscape lighting represents a significant

Gearing Up

As winter draws to a close here in the northeast, we begin preparing in earnest to deal with the inevitable springtime rush. There are contracts to sign, materials to order, plants to grow, schedules to set and hires (if any) to be made. And we do all of this knowing that, once the weather breaks, we want to burst out of the gate like an odds-on favorite at the Kentucky Derby. To make this happen, we need to be ready. Where I live and work, winters are usually long, so by spring our coffers are low, our staff is eager to get some exercise and our general desire to

Working on the Water

From its very first issue, this magazine has made one key point over and over again: Soil conditions determine the way a watershape’s shell is constructed; to achieve success in construction, the approach must be established by a competent engineer and followed on site. Through the years, numerous contributors to the magazine have described the process of placing watershapes on hillsides or dealing with soil conditions that lead to differential settlement. So far, however, relatively little attention has been paid to the challenges of working in locations where

Finding Hope

This is almost certainly the toughest column I’ve ever written – and probably the most important. In past editorials, it hasn’t been unusual for me to share various forms of personal information, some of it about my family, some of it concerning my own health. I’ve been keenly gratified by the words of support I’ve received from colleagues and friends on those occasions, and I thank you here, one and all. This is, I fear, another of those occasions, as I