ARTICLES Archives - Page 264 of 312

Liquid Stages: Steve Oliver’s Platinum Standard Project

Watershaping advanced by leaps and bounds from 1999 through 2004 – a journey of artistry…

Widely recognized as one of the country’s foremost authorities on watergardens, streams and cascades, Eamonn Hughes’ watershapes in the Pacific Northwest are among the most beautiful found anywhere in the world. Here, he shares several of his favorite past projects, using them to define what it takes to achieve believable, naturalistic results with waterfalls, cascades, streams and ponds of any size, large or small, in just about any setting.

Natural Patterns

So often, design comes down to an ability to see patterns. I first learned this from my mother, a dressmaker who had an uncanny ability to look at garments for which there were no sewing patterns and then sit down and make them from scratch. I seem to have inherited this talent, taking in a barren landscape and quickly visualizing how it will look with plants, rocks and water. For this, I am happily in her debt. Not everyone comes across such a gift by birth, but I believe that the ability to visualize is something most any watershaper can develop through experience and by taking the time to learn the "language" of any

For more than three decades, artist and tile maker Michelle Griffoul has pushed at the boundaries of her chosen medium. Her wildly colorful and boldly expressive works bristle with a passion for nature and a love of whimsy, resulting in a body of work unique in the realms of interior, exterior and watershape design. In this feature, she defines her distinctive approach to a classic material and takes us on a pictorial tour of her colorful works of art.

Coloring with Clay

I've been playing with clay for a long time - ever since 1968, when I took my first ceramics class in high school. Clay has captured my imagination mainly with its flexibility: I can carve it, build with it and even color it. For years, I've sculpted pieces of tile out of stoneware and porcelain clay. The individual pieces are then combined to create mosaic compositions, which, among other things, means that I'm able to create works of art that can go just about anywhere and are especially at home in and around water. Now, more than 30 years into working with this wonderful medium as a potter, then as an art student in the United States and Italy and especially in

Good Chemistry

Water is a chemical compound with a variety of physical characteristics, including the ability to act as a solvent and to harbor life. For those two reasons alone, says chemistry expert Jeff Freeman, watershape designers and builders should want to know everything they can about water chemistry - but they typically don't. Here, he begins a new series on the importance of water chemistry with a discussion of why watershapers really do need to care.

Set in the glorious Shenandoah Valley of western Virginia, this project called on watershaper Mario Abaldo’s firm to strike an energetic balance between form, function, the needs of the site and input from the homeowners – with everything assembled atop a basic structure that had been ineptly started by another builder. Here, Abaldo shows us around the finished backyard and a variety of amenities that bring the words ‘something for everyone’ to mind.

The Complete Retreat

Finishing up a project of any size is all about the details. From the final touches on the artificial rockwork and the placing and adjusting of lights to the fine tuning of the circulation system and signing off on the equipment room, the art of fine watershaping ultimately boils down to applying the same stringent standards for excellence that you bring to the beginning and middle of the project straight through to the end. Of course, it's virtually impossible to complete a project of this magnitude without

Just the Ticket

There are those in this business who are extremely adept at selling, and I'm definitely not one of them. I get by, but it's never been my long suit by any means. I've always admired the good salespeople I've met, and I fully accept the hard reality that to build a watershape at any level, one must sell it first. But I came up on the design/construction side of the watershaping business, and I've never found a clear way past the fact that, for me, sales has always been an area where I consistently have plenty of room for personal growth and improvement. I know that selling is important not only because it brings business through the door, but also because it sets the stage for everything that follows as a project progresses. As practiced by real professionals, I've observed that it's much more about

A Visual Audition

Recently, I've been involved in the early stages of a project that has lent new meaning to the phrase, "seeing is believing." It came up as a result of a call from an agent for a well-heeled client who was interested in having me design and build a residential swimming pool in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. When I arrived in Texas, I was met by the owner's agent, David, and by Marcus Bowen, a landscape architect who was part of the large project team, which, I would learn, included architects, a landscape architect, an interior designer, a lighting designer, various engineers, numerous

Feeling Right at Home

My daughter and I just returned from our annual trip to visit family in Connecticut and used the occasion this time to travel all over the northeast - from Boothbay Harbor, Portland and Camden in Maine to Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket and other parts of Massachusetts as well as slices of New Hampshire and Rhode Island. I'm never disappointed by the beauty I find in that part of the country. The landscapes are much lusher than they are at home in southern California, a fact that drives home the point that I spend most of my time in a desert. The old-growth trees back east are

Precision Planning

I operate under the hopeful assumption that all professional watershapers know that detailed, quality construction plans are crucial to the success of any project. Too often, however, I get the unsettling feeling that some contractors in the watershaping trades see plan documents mainly as a means of securing a construction permit. Such a bare-minimum approach can lead to an endless array of problems that can be summed up simply: Plans lacking in detail leave way too many issues to chance and inevitably lead to mistakes. And because we all work in a field where things are quite literally