Pools & Spas
In recent years, I've become increasingly focused on landing projects on St. Thomas, St. John and a bunch of other paradisal surface eruptions off the east coast of North America: I like the people, enjoy the climate and truly love the laid-back island culture I find even among the high-end clients who call on me to design their poolscapes. Quite often, the settings are the far side of spectacular, too, with views of multi-hued coastal waters of the Atlantic Ocean stretching out for miles, often interrupted by
From the start, this project was all about the view: The property sits above Lake Moumelle about 30 minutes outside Little Rock, Ark., in a small town called Roland. The lake serves as the primary reservoir for the state capital, so the waters are as serene and pristine as can be - no fishing, no boats, just thousands of acres of uninterrupted serenity. We at J. Brownlee Design (Nashville, Tenn.) had been asked to design the exteriors for a new home that was then under construction on the site. The homeowners, a couple with two children, and wanted a space that would be
It's a class of projects I'm coming across more and more often these days: Clients with homes in new developments want swimming pools and spas for their backyards, but the buildings are so big and consume so much of the available real estate that finding places to put worthy watershapes is a real challenge. The difficulty, of course, is that these homeowners are just like the owners of larger properties in wanting more than just pools and spas these days: They're thinking about generous seating and dining areas, outdoor
There are two common options when it's time to design the wall for a vanishing-edge swimming pool: cut it in or cut it away. With a cut-in approach, the top of the wall is cut down into the pool so that the water surface extends to the outside edge of the wall - effectively submerging it even when the water is not flowing over the edge. By contrast, a cut-away wall is one where the top of the wall angles down and away from the pool so that the water surface terminates at the inside edge of the wall. This results in the
This project started with an unexpected phone call. The clients, who live in Iowa much of the year but have a second home on the water's edge in Tampa Bay, had spotted a Wall Street Journal article in which a photograph of a swimming pool with a "floating" fire pit had been included. They loved the look and figured they could use it to dress up the poolscape that had come with their Florida retreat - if only they could find a local company to do it! Looking through the text, she spotted a reference to the fact that we at Ryan Hughes|Design|Build had designed and competed the project that
There are three things I particularly like about this project: The first is that it was a referral through Skip Phillips, a co-founder of Genesis and one of my mentors as I've gained experience as a watershaper. He had worked on a project for the clients in Canada, and they asked if he knew of a good pool company in the Phoenix area. Backed up by our portfolio and reputation, Phillips's recommendation made us the right choice. The second is that the site had so
In the course of my watershaping career, I've come to divide remodeling projects into two distinct categories. The first is what I call cosmetic refurbishing. Here, all a homeowner usually wants is a superficial updating of a pool's or spa's appearance or performance through application of a new interior finish, some fresh waterline tile, maybe new coping and decking and, often, new equipment or perhaps a poolside waterfeature. I avoid these projects as energetically as possible because, typically, the challenges are thin and there's little room for creativity. The second category encompasses what I call
I could easily have done a whole sequence in this video series about materials used to line the insides of pools, spas and other watershapes. From plaster and paint to pebbles and hydraulic terrazzo (and more), there are many paths my clients can take in deciding what to do with interior surfaces. But really, there's only one finish I want to discuss as these What Is It? videos hit
An Interview with Alison Terry, Dave Penton & Jimmy Reed by Jim McCloskey The first time I visited this backyard, the pool was complete and beautiful, but there was one discordant detail: Along the far end was a wooden fence that cut off the view. I was there with tile specialist Jimmy Reed, and this wasn't a feature he mentioned. So, being both polite and sufficiently dazzled by the pool, I didn't bring up the sore thumb. The next time I saw the backyard, I immediately figured out that the fence had been a temporary detail: I was there with pool builder Dave Penton, who at the time was
In recent years, I've had the good fortune to tackle a number of watershaping projects in the islands off the coast of eastern North America. From the West Indies to the Caribbean, I've learned in pursuing these projects that fresh water and electricity can be amazingly expensive commodities. These are, of course, settings in which numerous clients want to take advantage of water-on-water views. Trouble is, the vanishing edges that achieve these effects are questionable choices where the energy required to run them is costly; where winds and evaporation
