access
In recent years, I've become increasingly focused on landing projects on St. Thomas, St. John and a bunch of other paradisal surface eruptions off the east coast of North America: I like the people, enjoy the climate and truly love the laid-back island culture I find even among the high-end clients who call on me to design their poolscapes. Quite often, the settings are the far side of spectacular, too, with views of multi-hued coastal waters of the Atlantic Ocean stretching out for miles, often interrupted by
It's a class of projects I'm coming across more and more often these days: Clients with homes in new developments want swimming pools and spas for their backyards, but the buildings are so big and consume so much of the available real estate that finding places to put worthy watershapes is a real challenge. The difficulty, of course, is that these homeowners are just like the owners of larger properties in wanting more than just pools and spas these days: They're thinking about generous seating and dining areas, outdoor
It was the perfect confluence of needs and ideas: Mattamy Homes, a Canadian developer based in Toronto, was working on a project in Edmonton, Alberta - a new community called Stillwater that they wanted to elevate with an "amenity center." This key space, we learned, was meant to promote healthy, active lifestyles by offering residents a play area that would include both a skating rink and a unique splash pad. As planned, the community was set up with wilderness areas, hiking trails and other opportunities meant to encourage enjoyment of the great outdoors. To capture that spirit in the splash pad and playground, Mattamy Homes enlisted the services of Calgary, Alberta-based Park N Play Design, a designer and installer of custom indoor and outdoor recreation spaces throughout Canada. The resulting splash-pad design includes a large, custom-fabricated set of spray rings that provides fun for children of all ages while at the same time creating an eye-catching, artistic visual at the heart of
My work as a landscape architect is usually recognized for two distinguishing characteristics - first for the inspiration I draw from my friend and mentor, the late, great Brazilian environmental artist Roberto Burle Marx, and then for my driving ambition to preserve and restore habitats, as expressed in projects throughout South Florida and across the Florida Keys and various islands in the Caribbean and the West Indies. This is why seeing the project discussed here comes as something of a surprise to many who are familiar with my work: It's located in Big Timber, Mont., a blip on the road between
Inter-Fab (Tucson, AZ) offers Designer Series Grab Rails for pool and spa applications. Available singly…
In most of our projects, we do the lion's share of the work related to our clients' backyards. We'll design and build the pool and spa, set up the landscape and take care of all of the components of outdoor living from laying decks to installing outdoor kitchens. We like having that level of control over exterior environments, and our clients seem to appreciate the single-source service we're able to provide. Every once in a while, however, we'll come across a project so outstanding that we're perfectly happy to join a great team, interpret someone else's plans and
Three words come to mind when I consider what's been happening with the Main Fountain Garden at Longwood Gardens for the last two-and-a-half years: ambitious, audacious and amazing. The people behind the project, from Longwood's management team to all of the outside players who signed on to get the work done, were supremely ambitious in deciding to reconstruct a historic national treasure - first commissioned in 1931 - and bring it abruptly up to 21st-century standards for performance, automation and serviceability. They were audacious to the extent that they decided that all of this should happen in plain view, with no visual obstructions to hide what was going on from the public at large - no construction pen, no yellow tape, no barriers of any kind to keep the observers who crowd the fountain's famed Conservatory Terrace from seeing exactly what was happening with their beloved water display. But so amazing! Although it had been in decline
S.R. Smith (Canby, OR) manufactures the Splash! aquatic pool lift. Designed to comply with the…
By early 2015, my folder of saved emails was stuffed with years' worth of questions people wanted me to answer about either their ponds or, as frequently, ponds in general. I decided at that time to answer a number of these inquiries in a video series I've called "Ask the Pond Digger." Most of the questions came from pond owners and do-it-yourselfers, but many others had come from
