Pools & Spas
I love it when a project teaches me a lesson about my design process. In this case, it was just a smallish insight - but it had a profound effect on the outcome just the same. I'd seen this property for the first time while the home was under construction. It was a large building, about three-quarters complete, that occupied most of a fairly large parcel. The clients were happy to show me around, let me figure things out and come
As a mixed-use apartment complex in downtown Indianapolis, Ind., the not-quite-modestly named Artistry complex boasts sleek architecture and modern features intended to reflect the community's long history of skilled craftsmanship as well as its appreciation for the arts and commitment to active, energetic lifestyles. The main building features five stories of urban apartment homes above 68,000 square feet of commercial office space. Two additional buildings provide options for alternative accommodations, including
Who says you have to live in the Rockies to get the perfect mountain home? These clients are living that dream just outside Kansas City, Mo. Not long ago, they purchased land north of the Missouri River near Smithville, a rural outpost known for its rolling hills, plentiful trees and tobacco farms. It's a place where relatively low-cost land is still available, and people have started buying acreage and building their
Vanishing-edge walls have been a common design detail for the past 25-odd years and have been the subject of seminars and workshops almost as long as I can remember. Still, it's clear that there are several key points about how they should be designed and installed that elude watershapers who persist in treating these key structural components as little more than glorified in-pool spa dam walls or some other internal detail. You can probably
It happens only rarely, but every once in a while you run into a client who wants to do things out of sequence. Most often, we're asked to work on projects where there's an existing home that needs a watershape. Just as commonly, we're brought in when a home is being built at the same time as a new pool and its associated environment. In the case described in this article, however, our client owned a 20-acre site with little more than
Swimming continues to grow as a preferred method of exercise and physical therapy for people of all ages, with commercial aquatic facilities seeing healthy increases in patronage year after year. And whether it's water aerobics, resistance training, water walking or aquatic yoga, there's now much more to this popularity than traditional swim lessons for newcomers and laps or competitions for those with developed swimming skills. With this popularity comes
One of the things I like most about working in the watershaping business these days is how clever and creative designers and builders have become at what they do. It's not just the big details such as vanishing edges, play-pool configurations, sun shelves or swim-up bars. And it's about more than beach entries, grottos, laminar jets and cool spillways. Those are all great, every one of them, but what I'm talking about here is the attention to the small things - the subtle ways more and more watershapers are finding to make
It definitely helps to have a good reputation within the local design community. In this case, an architect I've known for years and have worked with on numerous occasions - someone with whom I've gotten so familiar with on the job site that we've become good friends - called me in to meet clients who needed help beyond the work he was doing on their house. He thought we'd be a good fit, and he was right: From our first meeting, the clients and I
I'd hazard the guess that most experienced pool designers and builders have run into this scenario: The clients want a pool, and they also want a spa - but not just any spa will do. Through the years, these clients have been in the attached spas of friends' inground concrete pools, but this is not what they want. That's because they've also experienced portable spas and prefer their performance: superior jet action, diverse seating arrays and options, more features and
Sometimes, things come together in just the right way. I'd been called in to a multimillion-dollar property with a large, three-year-old house on it, right next to the Chattahoochee River on the northwestern fringe of Atlanta. There was an existing pool, but the homeowners wanted something new - a composition that befitted the home's elegance and said more about
