appropriate design
It's a rare project in which a watershaper has the opportunity to execute a complete design without compromise. In our Scottsdale, Ariz.-based business, we often work with upscale clients on custom pool and spa installations, and it seems that there's always some element or other in the design that ends up being altered or left out. It sometimes reaches the point where we start to feel as though the result, although it may be satisfying to the client, is not fully reflective of our talent, our vision or our best effort. The project pictured in these pages, however, is a dramatic exception to that rule. Although the clients were involved with general suggestions during the design process and construction project, when it came down to details of the plan, they let us go ahead and create an environment that fully reflected our creative vision. They'd seen one of our projects in a local "Street of Dreams" program in which area contractors were selected to build spec homes on the same street in a town just north of Scottdale called Troon. Once the row of home was completed, there were tours, awards and lots of media coverage - quite the high-profile affair. The clients had been in contact with four or five different pool builders in the area, but they'd
I never really thought much about the plants and trees surrounding me until I started edging my way toward the landscape-design business. Growing up, I'd look out my bedroom window and into our backyard and see plants and trees, but I didn't know that they were called Junipers or Giant Birds of Paradise or Ficus trees. They all looked pretty much the same to me - a generic veil of greenery. My path of discovery began when I bought my first house on Long Island. All of a sudden, there were rules about
Finding ways to blend the angular rhythms of modern architecture with the sweeping splendors of nature constitutes one of the more difficult challenges faced by today's watershapers. In the case of the project pictured on these pages, we were contacted in 2002 about an enormous, modern-style home on Mercer Island overlooking the shore of Lake Washington, right near Seattle. The property was being remodeled, and the owners wanted a set of watershapes that would enhance the beauty of the two-acre estate while more convincingly integrating the geometry of the structure with its woodsy lakefront setting. The solution: a set of watershapes that start near the house with perfect geometric forms that stick to the architect's original design, then moves down the hillside through various transitional stages to a pond feature that looks like part of
Vanishing-edge pools are all about changing the relationship of the water to its surroundings. They enable the water to reflect views and create visual links to the surrounding scenery in dramatic and surprising ways that simply can't be achieved with conventional designs. The same distinction is true of perimeter-overflow systems and pools with deck-level (or slot-overflow) designs, which is why I classify all three together as "water-in-transit" systems. There's a lot of diversity under that big conceptual umbrella, but these pools share
