Roaring Up the High Road

Eric Herman

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with hot rods.

I suspect this resulted from my dad’s subscriptions to magazines such as Road & Track and Street Rod: I was mesmerized by the chrome engines, fancy rims, custom interiors and all those audacious paint jobs, and I’d spend hours poring over the pictures, re-reading the articles and dreaming about a set of wheels that would someday be mine.

As a teen, my first car was a beat up ’66 Ford Ranchero – dented body, tarnished hub caps and faded sea-green paint. It was a far cry indeed from the tricked-out machines I coveted, but by the time I sold it six years later, I have to say that the old wagon had come a long way: gleaming chrome rims, a great stereo and, best of all, black pinstripes on a pearl-white paint job. It looked great, even though the engine, suspension and body were nothing more than factory stock.

I’d be willing to put up the pink slip my next car on a bet that auto-parts and accessories manufacturers move a lot more merchandise to the legions of average Joes like me than they do to collectors with garages full of vintage automobiles.

This is why I credit WaterShapes for doing the same sort of dream-feeding work as Road & Track and other magazines geared to the ambitions of “car crazies”: showing so many spectacular examples of recreational and decorative water and publishing so many projects with outsized ambitions and budgets, the magazine informs its readers about the extremes of the spectrum of possibilities and inspires you to offer your clients watershapes that reach beyond the ordinary.

Indeed, one of the most gratifying things we ever hear is how many of you actually share copies of WaterShapes with clients when discussing potential designs and approaches to technical issues. That’s a practice I hope continues, for the simple reason that it’s tough for consumers to want something they’ve never seen.

Case in point: In this issue, you’ll find coverage of a project that is as high-end and outrageous as any I’ve ever seen – a true hot rod of a pool, if you will. Although few may ever work on such a project, this article is a must for anyone who loves really cool swimming pools in spectacular places.

In the first article we ran on this project (see our May 2004 issue), watershaper Steve Dallons of Pacific Pools in Alamo, Calif., let us take a look under the hood with the pool and spa, which he has suspended in a cantilevered deck that soars well beyond the second level of an absolutely breathtaking mountaintop home. This time (click here), we finish the coverage with an assemblage of amazing photos of the finished project.

But even with its lofty setting, indoor/outdoor design, precise construction and spectacular materials, we’re still looking at a basic rectangle that’s not so far removed from thousands of pools that are now being considered for countless other settings. What’s important, I think, is how inspirational Steve’s project can become by leading a prospective client to consider the possibility of, say, upgrading the decking, incorporating a perimeter-overflow system or even tiling the pool’s interior.

To be sure, the typical middle-class homeowner won’t go for the whole program (just as I never managed to add an all-leather interior to my Ranchero), but the possibility is out there for one and all to absorb. That’s why we select projects for publication the way we do: It’s just plain fun to think about what “someday” might bring.