One of the important lessons I learned as a young watershaper is that I am not a surveyor. Working on a pool design in the hills south of California's Napa Valley many, many years ago, I found myself on a sloping lot, broke out my line level and figured I could, with some patience and care, map all of the relevant elevations and develop a suitable design based on my observations of the contours. As it turned out, I was
If you're like me and see life as a weird balance of the tragic and the comic, I have a couple stories tailor-made for you. First the comic - and forgive me for its reference to a component of male anatomy: "When the Dutch city of Leeuwarden
If I've learned anything through the years, it's that a successful, truly satisfying project generally requires a good client and, quite often, a great project team. What the good client was after in the project discussed here was pretty simple - that is, an oval-shaped pool to go along with a large, oval-shaped shade structure another contractor was to install alongside it. Making a fine start, the client called in Skip Phillips of
No matter the method by which it is applied, concrete is a fascinating material. The history books tell us that it's been in use for thousands of years - as far back as 6500 BC, when it was used by Bedouins to make cisterns in which they collected and kept water underground in desert climates. The ancient Greeks used concrete, too, as did the Assyrians and especially
In any large-scale watershaping project, managing the logistics has a way of becoming the most important task of all. In the case under discussion here, that might even be an understatement when you weigh all of the complicating factors. First, the job site was located in central Colombia, in the foothills of South America's Andes mountain range. Second, that locale is essentially a tropical rainforest, and when it wasn't pouring by the bucketful, it was crushingly hot and humid. Third, ours is a North American company that works with its own products and has no distribution in Colombia. And there's more: To get the job done, we knew we
The summer swim season has arrived, which means I've spent the last week or two coping with the annual flood of stories about how awful and threatening water can be. No matter whether a given story focuses on pools, spas or some other body of water, these items warn people who like to dunk themselves to play, cool off, relax or
QCP (Norco, CA) manufactures Slab, a precast-concrete fire feature available in a variety of colors…
Bradford Products (Leland, NC) fabricates custom spas in stainless steel. Available in any shape or…
