ARTICLES Archives - Page 55 of 315

If there's one thing he's learned in completing projects for clients who can afford whatever they want, it's that planning is the key. But before that, notes Ryan Hughes, he needs a design that makes sense, suits the site and gives him every opportunity to pursue both fun and beauty.

Entertaining Possibilities

Some of our favorite projects have gotten us involved with an unusual class of clients. These folks are affluent enough that they travel extensively and own multiple homes in spots around the world - places they'll stay for stretches ranging from a couple weeks to several months each year. When it comes to developing or remodeling new acquisitions, they'll set some basic ground rules and step back, leaving the specifics to a trusted firm or individual who assembles a hand-picked

‘Big Easy’ Bound

I'm almost ready to board a plane for my trip to New Orleans and the 2019 International Pool|Spa|Patio Expo, and I have to say I haven't been this curious about what's going to happen at a trade show for many, many years. Change is definitely in the wind these days - with

The Power in Partnering

'When you work with someone in a cooperative effort to achieve a common goal,' wrote Curt Straub in a trailblazing article in October 1999, 'the odds are greatly reduced that you will wind up one day facing that person in a courtroom. 'The neat thing about this form of cooperation, also known in business circles as partnering, is that it can do much more than keep you off your lawyer's time clock. In fact, partnering is something that all of us in the industry can

It’s Easier Being Green

'Until quite recently,' declared Brian Van Bower in opening his October 2009 Aqua Culture column, 'it was difficult to find too many people in the watershaping industry who were willing to say much about "going green." 'For a while now, I've thought that was a mistake: It's been manifestly clear for several years that practices and programs related to energy conservation, water conservation and an overall sense of environmental responsibility are here to stay, and I always think it's better to

Now familiar with the unusual realities of the huge fountain-renovation project they'd undertaken, J. Wickham Zimmerman and Chris Roy had to figure out how to proceed despite difficult access, limited pipe penetrations and, of course, super-high civic expectations.

Grand Solutions

It's the nature of the game: One of the great sources of pride for any good watershaping business has to do with its ability to find solutions to difficult challenges - a new way to achieve something familiar when the established or conventional approach won't work, for example, or dealing with site constraints that repeatedly send you back to the drawing board. That's the sort of pride we had coming out of our work on the Arthur J. Will Memorial Fountain and its accompanying splash pad at Grand Park in Los Angeles, and it was intensified by the fact that this was the restoration of a 60-year-old fountain that had originally been built with an entirely different approach from anything we'd consider today - but whose physical constraints we couldn't

It's tough to develop a landscape design that satisfies the social needs of a family while also meeting the practical needs of a thriving home-based business, writes Colleen Holmes. Ever consider what's involved in setting up a parking lot so it also serves as an off-hours retreat?

Committed to Balance

For most of my professional life, I've worked on projects in which the dominant color is green. With the project under discussion here, however, both the client and the setting called for something quite different. As I knew going in, the property, located in Northridge, Calif., is both a residence and a place of business, so on any given workday multiple cars and trucks invade the space and need convenient places to park. But while this primary use of a plaza-scale space as a parking pad suited clients' business needs, it was plainly too dusty and downright bleak to offer any

To watershape designers and landscape professionals who see lighting as uncharted territory, Bruce Dennis offers simple encouragement: Apply what you already know about artfully organizing spaces and working with contrasts and textures and you already have a big head start.

Lighting by Design

What's involved in a good landscape-lighting project? Whole books have been written on this topic, and it's not hard to find week-long workshops devoted to showing professionals how to produce finely illuminated environments for their clients. If you're a designer or a design-oriented contractor, however, I'd suggest that you have enough of a head start that we can set you off in a good direction with this brief article and its focus on the features of a good lighting program. You already think like an artist, which is great, and know how to identify focal points and

When It Rains

My last blog - the one about the emergence of Ask the Masters and Watershape University as evolutionary extensions of the Genesis movement - was written when I had no inkling there would be more big news coming. But come it did, when Skip Phillips announced late in September that he was

Learning by Doing

'In my capacity as landscape consultant to a town near where I live,' wrote Bruce Zaretsky to open his On the Level column for September 2009, 'I was approached . . . by a landscape architect who was just starting her career after graduating from a prestigious, five-year landscape architecture program. 'She was designing a butterfly garden, she said, and wanted to know

Approaching the renovation of an historic fountain set over an existing, untouchable structure is daunting enough. But it gets tougher, write J. Wickham Zimmerman and Chris Roy, when the original documentation is sketchy and you have no choice but to figure out how to proceed.

Grand Expectations

With any watershape renovation project, there's a great deal of anticipation of what you'll discover once the system is dismantled to whatever degree or level is necessary. In some cases, all is well and the process of reworking structures and systems unfolds smoothly. In others, however, there are surprises that can take your breath away. This was one of those "other" cases - the restoration of an historic fountain that had been in place since 1958 as well as the upgrading of an adjacent space to accommodate a splash pad for interactive play and provide a stage for