Pools & Spas
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,
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
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
My recent article in WaterShapes left readers in some suspense. As reported last time (click here), we were most of the way through the design process and were actually getting ready to start important work on site when the homeowners sprung something new on us. They'd just returned from a trip to Europe, and they'd been so inspired by what they'd seen that they wondered if we could inject a sense of the "Old World" into the project. The goal had previously been about creating a naturalistic setting in which wilderness seemed intent on reclaiming the space. Their fresh desire was to make explicit the notion that a
There's a lot to be said for working with the same homeowners through extended periods on various projects on single sites. From easier communications and familiarity with personalities to full awareness of site dynamics and the capabilities of local talent, the advantages of these long-term relationship quickly collect in long lists. In this particular case, we at Hess Landscape Architects (Lansdale, Pa.) have worked on one particular property for a pair of clients for ten years now. This has included a variety of projects on an estate that covers
With the effects of the Great Depression still rocking the economy in the mid-1930s, the Works Progress Administration became a major employer and creative force that put many still-treasured public facilities on the map. In fact, there are few cities in the country that don't boast a park, bridge, post office or some other public structure built by some of the millions of laborers who found work through the WPA. In 1937, Vincennes, Ind., was a particularly fortunate beneficiary of WPA's prowess in the form of the Rainbow Beach Aquatic Center - one of the most innovative and distinctive of all such facilities built up to that time. The goals were two: to provide jobs for the unemployed and to address an alarming increase in
This was one of those cases where a project that offers all the indications of a direct path to success took a couple of weird turns that complicated things in unusual ways. The pool and spa are located high up in Trousdale Estates, a canyon-hugging neighborhood above Beverly Hills, Calif. The views are magnificent all the way to downtown Los Angeles in one direction and to the Pacific Ocean in another - and the spaces in which the pool and separate spa had been placed took the fullest possible advantage of those prospects. Our client was a multifaceted home-design/build company that had a distinguished track record with this sort of all-concrete
It all started in the years following World War II, when large parcels of undeveloped suburban land were carved into tracts in which, all too often, as many homes as possible were included to accommodate huge population influxes. In a nutshell, this is why so many of the lots in places like southern California are relatively small. We do lots of our work in these "bedroom communities," and I wish I had a nickel for every time I've been asked to shoehorn full-featured pools and spas into tiny backyards with limited access. It can be done - we at Aqua-Link Pools & Spas (Carlsbad, Calif.) frequently tackle small-yard projects - but each of them carries
As watershapers, we all have one common goal in mind: We don't ever want our concrete pools, spas, fountains or waterfeatures - whatever it is we've just finished building - to move at any time, in any way at all. This is true no matter the physical or geological circumstances. On a slope, on the flat, elevated above a parking garage or set on rock or in sand or clay, wherever we're working, we follow
I consider myself fortunate to work in a part of the country where the soil holds few mysteries. There's a lot of clay, which means we make our shells stronger than you typically do in the sandy soils of Florida, but we don't generally have the sorts of steep slopes where you have to worry about having a pool
