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In renovation projects, preparation of the pool's interior surface for a new finish is truly where the rubber meets the road - a key step in which what you've planned and what you actually do must come together. With this installment of "Details," we're doubling back to the Los Angeles project we left behind in October as we waited for tile to arrive from Italy. If you'll recall, the pool had been built in the 1920s and graces a property with a magnificent Gatsby-era home. As I mentioned at the outset of this interrupted sequence of columns, the homeowners have been extremely involved, always wanting to know as much as they possibly can about what's going on in their backyard. As I mentioned as well, the challenge
I found a new "favorite" plant last summer. It's called Dalechampia dioscorefolia, otherwise known as the Costa Rican Butterfly Vine. Its stunningly beautiful, exotic flowers were unlike those on any of the vines I typically see at nurseries and easily earned a place in my disorganized (and experimental) backyard garden. Given its unique beauty, I placed it on a trellis directly outside my bedroom window so I could see it every day and observe its progress. After a few months of growth, it was still quite floppy and had not wrapped itself around places high enough on the trellis for my liking. So one Saturday, I went out and wrestled apart many of the branches of the vine that had wrapped around themselves and set them up to reach
Many have asked me how it is that my work is published so often. I'm not talking about this column, which is about what I do and occasionally depicts my work to illustrate a point I'm making about what we do as watershapers. Rather, the question's about my projects making their ways into books and consumer magazines and other media beyond WaterShapes. The short answer is that I focus on garnering this sort of exposure and have actively cultivated it through the years. As is the case with anything else you do to draw positive attention to your business, seeking to have your work published in a book or magazine takes time and effort and an understanding of what working with writers and editors is all about. The benefits of
One of the best things about watershaping from my point of view is that it can be so interesting. I'm fascinated, for example, by what happens when watershapers connect with clients, discern their wants and needs and then
The resort opened in 1994 with completion of Phase I of a program that emerged once developer and entrepreneur Sol Kerzner bought the property from Merv Griffin in 1992. Phase II saw another round of construction that was opened to the public in 1998 - and ever since, Atlantis, Paradise Island, Bahamas, has been known around the world as a prime vacation spot for couples and families. The original pre-1992 property consisted of three buildings that had been built about 30 years previously along with one swimming pool and 27 tennis courts. Today, the facility occupies about 70% of Paradise Island's 826 acres on the northern edge of Nassau and is the unabashed expression of
The resort opened in 1994 with completion of Phase I of a program that emerged once developer and entrepreneur Sol Kerzner bought the property from Merv Griffin in 1992. Phase II saw another round of construction that was opened to the public in 1998 - and ever since, Atlantis, Paradise Island, Bahamas, has been known around the world as a prime vacation spot for couples and families. The original pre-1992 property consisted of three buildings that had been built about 30 years previously along with one swimming pool and 27 tennis courts. Today, the facility occupies about 70% of Paradise Island's 826 acres on the northern edge of Nassau and is the unabashed expression of
Natural stone is certainly beautiful, says watershaper Paolo Benedetti, but sustaining that beauty often means taking steps in the installation process to ensure easy maintenance and enduring protection of the stone's exposed surfaces. Here, in the first of a series on enhancing the appearance and durability of hardscape materials found around watershapes, he takes a look at the family of chemicals designed to seal in the splendor of stone.
Water moving in all sorts of different directions (but always in controlled ways) is a hallmark of one our favorite designers, architect David Tardiff. We've built the watershapes for many of his projects, and we've particularly enjoyed those that put both his vigor and special subtlety on display. Time and again, his designs have challenged us technically while rewarding our clients with results that always seem to leave them proud, amazed and thoroughly satisfied. As we've discussed in our previous WaterShapes articles, a large part of our business is about executing watershapes for architects and landscape architects in the backyards of mostly affluent clients in southern California's Orange County. Each designer has his or her own creative style and sensibility, leaving us to adapt the work we do to their "idea sets" while lending our years of practical experience in engineering and construction to the process. In working this way, we find that everyone comes out a winner: The designer creates work that is based in reality; we stretch and expand our skills to realize truly spectacular design concepts; and most important, clients gain refined spaces that hit the mark with respect to both functionality and aesthetics. The two projects we'll visit on these pages are
Finding ways to blend the angular rhythms of modern architecture with the sweeping splendors of nature constitutes one of the more difficult challenges faced by today's watershapers. In the case of the project pictured on these pages, we were contacted in 2002 about an enormous, modern-style home on Mercer Island overlooking the shore of Lake Washington, right near Seattle. The property was being remodeled, and the owners wanted a set of watershapes that would enhance the beauty of the two-acre estate while more convincingly integrating the geometry of the structure with its woodsy lakefront setting. The solution: a set of watershapes that start near the house with perfect geometric forms that stick to the architect's original design, then moves down the hillside through various transitional stages to a pond feature that looks like part of
This column must be prefaced with the thought that, for a great many of our clients, perception is reality. That's something I hold onto whenever I get involved in trying to understand and use feng shui, the ancient Chinese method for arranging harmonious, balanced spaces. I am far from a devotee of the art (or science, as some would have it), but I'm aware that some of my clients know a thing or two about it - and that knowing something myself is essential to working with them successfully or at all. There are literally hundreds of books about feng shui. Of the half dozen I've read, none is better suited to the needs of the watershaper than The Complete Illustrated Guide to Feng Shui for Gardens by Lillian Too (Element, 1999). There are a couple of key points that make Too's perspective on feng shui so useful: First, she
