ARTICLES Archives - Page 72 of 325

Called back to a pool he'd bid on unsuccessfully ten years earlier, William Drakeley found that the winning contractor had fallen short in several ways. It was now up to him to persuade an extremely reluctant client to start all over again, this time with a more suitable approach.

Hard-Won Beauty

As we were wrapping up a WaterShapes article called "Working at Water's Edge" back in the fall of 2018, it occurred to me that there was another story to be told about one of the projects highlighted in the text. In that article (click here), a pool I wrote about was set up on the edge of a large, manmade lake. I briefly noted that I'd been called to the site as a consultant after having seen the place several years earlier as a designer/builder who hadn't won the contract. In this article, I'll go back to my initial contacts with the client and tell a fuller story of a trying relationship that, slowly and with great difficulty,

It's always fun working with clients who know what they want but don't think they can have it, writes Shane LeBlanc. And that's particularly true when they're great collaborators who've already taken steps to set the tone and prepare the space for a crowning aquatic touch.

Easing Transitions

If I've learned one truth about working with water in confined areas, it's that success is most often measured by how much more spacious an added watershape makes those areas seem. The funny thing in this particular case is that the yard wasn't especially small, sloping away from a formal house down to a rustic cottage set on the edge of the property. What was crowded was the upper-level area into which we decided to insert a big part of the pool: It was hemmed in on one side by the home and on the other by the lot's setback - a span of maybe 28 feet - below which the available space opened up and flowed down for about 30 feet to the cottage. In quick order, I found myself confronting three

Everyday Serenity

This amazing structure sits just off the route toward a more prominent tourist attraction, notes Victoria Lautman in the last of her series of articles on India's stepwells. But as is true of so many of these marvels, Peena Mann ka Kund is more than worth a detour off a well-beaten path.

Finding Ways

'Last month,' wrote Brian Van Bower to open his Aqua Culture column in the February 2004 issue of WaterShapes, 'I jumped into the New Year with a discussion of how the trends we face these days are influencing our recent experiences in business, society and life in general. 'All that was intended to set up this column's discussion of where we, as the watershaping industry, might be going in the months and years to come. . . . Rather than get into the aimless game of offering predictions, I'll delve instead into

Unusual Blowback

If you'll recall, last month I noted that one of my personal goals for 2019 was to include more green-oriented articles in these WaterShapes newsletters - and I must say that I've never run into a case where one of my New Year's resolutions kicked up so much dust! Within a few hours, I received

The project started with all the stress of figuring out how to satisfy regulators angered by the homeowner's previous attempts to beautify a protected streambed. Colleen Holmes saved the day by jumping through countless hoops -- then left her client with a lovely, hard-won haven.

Digging Deep

When my client purchased a home at the top of a steep ravine, all she really knew was that she owned a lengthy stretch of a streambed and the land rising above it on both sides. At some point after she moved in, she decided to beautify the space, had a load of 200 boulders dumped in the driveway and hired her landscaper to move them down to dress up the waterway, which was dry through most of the year and was overgrown with all sorts of unwelcome plants. What she didn't know was that she was fooling around with Kenter Creek, a federally protected Blue Line waterway that started high in the hills a couple miles away. She had figured, reasonably so, that the stream was

In Service of Trees

'All of us at one time or another run up against trees that are very much in the way - and our clients simply won't let us remove them. To be sure, working around such prized specimens can be a real pain,' wrote Bruce Zaretsky in his January 2009 On the Level column, 'which is why so many in the construction trades have passive-aggressive attitudes about them and just wish

A Healing Art

As our business has evolved through the years, more and more often we've found ourselves involved in designing, engineering and installing waterfeatures associated with hospitals, medical centers and other healthcare institutions. These projects usually fall under the heading of "wellness gardens" or "healing gardens" - that is, spaces set aside for patients, families and staff to decompress, meditate or simply take a break. While these watershapes are generally simple in concept, there's typically more to the way they're designed and built than meets the eye - a fact that adds an extra layer of

An All-Comers Fountain

While I was editor at Pool & Spa News in 1990 or 9'91, I was invited to Portland, Ore., to make a presentation to a regional meeting of what was then the National Spa & Pool Institute about what I'd experienced in becoming a pool owner. I had been with the magazine since 1987, and what had intrigued a northwestern friend of mine on NSPI's board was the fact that my family had moved houses in 1989 and had taken possession of a nice pool and spa in the process. (More important to me was the fact that we needed more space to accommodate our second daughter, who had arrived in October 1988.) My speech was on a Friday afternoon, and those were the days when you had to stay over a Saturday to avoid getting shafted on the cost of airline tickets. In those bad old days, it was actually much cheaper to stay an extra night in Oregon with all of the associated expenses than it would've been to fly home Saturday. This delayed return home, however, had the beneficial effect of allowing me to do a bit of local exploring. I'd been to Portland many times before, having lived down the Willamette River in Eugene for a few years early in the 1980s. But now that my focus was more on water than it had been previously, I visited several fountains and public waterfeatures and particularly enjoyed seeing some of Lawrence Halprin's work there for the first time. But that wasn't what most captured my imagination that day: Instead, it was the more modest Skidmore Fountain. Located in Portland's Old Town Historic District, it dates back to 1888 and reminded me strongly of the sort of remarkable civic fountains I'd seen in cities all over Europe in my travels in the 1970s. The Skidmore Fountain wasn't much to look at by 1990. It was clearly in need of repair and restoration, but it was just as clearly charming. It was named after a wealthy pharmacist named Stephen Skidmore, who contributed to the construction through his will, and executed by Olin Levi Warner, an American sculptor who studied at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris before setting up a studio in New York City.

Called in to rescue a troubled project, Jeromey Naugle figured out what the client really wanted in no time at all -- then had to cope with starts, stops and delays while delivering all of the features the homeowner craved to complete an impressively reflective backyard.

The Evocative Mirror

From the start, this one was all about reflections. The client was building a beautiful new home in Paradise Valley, an older, high-end suburb of Phoenix, Ariz., that nestles up against the base of Camelback Mountain. His greatest desire was to pull the dramatic structure and its setting together with a big, courtyard-style pool that would offer him special, unique perspectives on his surroundings, both up close and in the distance. To make it happen, the home builder had taken some pencil sketches provided by the client and his interior designer and handed them off to his