Pools & Spas
Vanishing-edge pools (or infinity pools, as some call them) have become a fixture in the world of pool and spa design. Once considered exotic and highly unusual, you find them now in
10 Amazing Swimming Pools In July of last year, Zillow published “10 Amazing Swimming Pools” on www.zillow.com, spotlighting the outdoor pools that came with 10 sumptuous homes. All the properties were
I’ve come to the world of watershaping from a different perspective. Back in the 1960s, I worked for a company that built poured-in-place concrete homes in Florida. Right from the beginning, I couldn’t help noticing the importance of waterproofing in the performance of these structures – or the consequences of not taking the potential for water intrusion seriously. My interest in this subject took on new significance in 1989, when I formed a Florida firm that conducted forensic analyses in all manner of structural failures as a service to
When my family started in the pool and spa service business some 25 years ago, it didn’t take us long to recognize that there was very little available to us by way of education about water chemistry – or, for that matter, about most of the other skills involved in maintaining pools, spas and other waterfeatures. That didn’t make much sense to us, even then. After all, how could an industry devoted to the health, safety and comfort of millions of people function without addressing the need for standardized approaches to water maintenance or
How many times have we seen a pile of artificial rocks plopped on the end or along the side of a freeform pool, left with no visual connection to anything else in the space? The answer, of course, is "countless times" - which prompts a far more important question: why? Why are we still seeing watershapes installed with edges that look to my eyes to be
We’ve been conditioned in the United States to think that the only safe water is water that has been sanitized by powerful chemicals and/or devices using ozone or ultraviolet light. In fact, it seems that our industry has promulgated a doctrine that we need to
By Beth Hamil In the first part of this in-depth look at ozone, author Beth Hamil discussed its environmental benefits for energy consumption, water usage and general healthfulness. [To read Part One, click here.] In this installment, she turns to the many new aquatic applications the ozone industry is exploring. Ozone-system suppliers have made enormous efforts in recent years to develop and scale new systems for all sorts of aquatic
If you use the words “ozone” and “environment” in the same sentence, most people are going to think of the ozone layer and emissions that may be harming it. Most do not think of manmade ozone and how this remarkable compound yields
When these clients decided that they wanted to have a swimming pool, they knew above all else that they did not want another box of blue water. By contrast, as avid patrons of Disney World, the Princeton, N.J., homeowners had decided that their pool should be what they called “Disney natural” – not as completely naturalistic as a real pond, but natural enough so that they and their children could suspend disbelief and pretend that they were swimming in a pond. Before we came on the scene, the clients had
Through the past two years, a handful of voices in this magazine and elsewhere have called for building pools without drains as a means of virtually eliminating suction-entrapment incidents. The response to this suggestion has been strong, both for and against. In sifting through some of these discussions – including a key interview with Dr. William N. Rowley that appeared online last fall on the WaterShapes Web site – one item caught my eye: It came from a watershaper who clearly didn’t have
