Aqua Culture
As watershape designs become ever more creative and adventurous, there's an increased need to help clients and other project participants visualize our plans. Indeed, presentation is a topic of great importance these days for designers from both the pool/spa industry and the landscape trades, so much so that it's become a fixture on educational calendars and one of the cornerstones of the Genesis 3 curriculum. What has everyone excited about upgrading the way they present their ideas is that there are various good ways to get the job done. To be sure, having the ability to draw is a tremendous asset - some would say an absolute necessity - but fortunately for those who are
We've all heard the phrase "less is more" so often that it's become a cliché, but there are still situations where there is powerful truth in those words. There is no question, for example, that watershapers can create tremendous beauty by using simple shapes and quality materials to accentuate and magnify a setting. This is particularly so when the watershaper exploits the alluring, reflective qualities of water itself to create a strong focal point while effectively blending the vessel into its setting. A case in point is the
I've always loved the word "pamper." I love its meaning, I like the way it sounds and, most of all, I think it's the perfect verb for us Baby Boomers, because I know as we slide through middle age and head toward retirement, a word that means "to treat with excessive indulgence, gratify desires or coddle" will only grow in usage and importance. As I've pointed out many times, I'm a big proponent of indulging in the good life and gratifying one's needs for pleasure and enjoyment. One of the places you can go to plunge headlong into such indulgence is what some people call
Over and over at seminars and trade shows, watershapers ask me three distinct but interrelated questions: "How do you get into the high-end market?" and "How do you deal with wealthy customers?" and "How do you handle those kinds of jobs?" The short answer to all of them is that I've set myself up for it and am prepared to tackle these projects and clients as they come. To me, it's as natural as breathing. The deeper answer is much more complicated, obviously, and has to do with my understanding that working with upper echelon clients means accommodating an entire range of issues that
Many have asked me how it is that my work is published so often. I'm not talking about this column, which is about what I do and occasionally depicts my work to illustrate a point I'm making about what we do as watershapers. Rather, the question's about my projects making their ways into books and consumer magazines and other media beyond WaterShapes. The short answer is that I focus on garnering this sort of exposure and have actively cultivated it through the years. As is the case with anything else you do to draw positive attention to your business, seeking to have your work published in a book or magazine takes time and effort and an understanding of what working with writers and editors is all about. The benefits of
Last month, I jumped into the New Year with a discussion of how the trends we face these days are influencing our recent experiences in business, society and life in general. In doing so, we navigated our through a mixed bag of factors - advancing technology, interesting economic times and complex legal conditions on the grand scale up alongside local, narrower issues having to do with the emergence of the watershaping business, the wayward nature of trade associations and the state of relevant education for our trades. All that was intended to set up this column's discussion of where we, as the watershaping industry, might be going in the months and years to come. Pure prognostication, however, is an imperfect process in which I won't indulge. Rather than get into the aimless game of offering predictions, I'll delve instead into
Some might say we're enduring the curse of living in interesting times; others might opine that the planet's just plain gone crazy. However you look at it, when you stop to consider what's been going on in the world, in our country and in the economy and how all of that relates to our watershaping corner of the universe, it's easy to see that important trends and even greater forces are constantly sweeping around us. So much is happening that it's often difficult to figure things out, but the most important observation I can make is that not all the news is gloomy - far from it. For a great many watershapers, in fact, business has thrived in recent times and expanded in new and exciting directions. That's so true for some that it's fair to say that there's been little or no time left for reflection. But I would argue that finding time to
When we think about how the environments we create are used, the first image that probably comes to mind is one of people enjoying themselves in or near the water on a beautiful, warm afternoon. That's natural - and a vision that's a big part of the watershape experience we set up for our clients - but it ignores the other half of the day when our clients are left to themselves with our work. The fact is that watershape owners are mostly working people who spend their days away from home earning their daily bread. So despite the fact that we build these things
During the five years I've been writing this column for WaterShapes, I've been asked by a number of people how I manage to find the time to write this column, make presentations at trade shows, teach at Genesis 3 schools and conduct my own design/consulting business. I get the distinct impression that these questions have much less to do with curiosity about the power of time management than with questions about why I'd even bother to extend my focus beyond my primary business of
One of the real tricks in any art form can be the challenge of exercising restraint. Bigger isn't always better, and both scale and size do matter. In other words, just because you can create something grand, it doesn't always mean that you should. This principle of proportionality has a sharp, specific meaning in the world of the custom watershaper, especially when clients ask for something that is oversized for the property or more elaborate than called for by the setting or surrounding architecture. We all know where it comes from: Clients have seen something they like, and it
