construction
Among the wonderful benefits of working in the custom watershaping business is that you never really know what sort of projects will wander into view. Through the years, we at Live Water Creations of Santa Rosa, Calif., have certainly participated in developing and executing some unusual designs, but I can honestly say that working on one that included a huge, beautiful steel pyramid topped by a deep-space telescope was something that had yet to come our way. And it would have stayed that way had I not received a call from John Anderson of Pools by Rapp, another firm here in Santa Rosa. We’ve collaborated on other projects in which our firm has built ponds or fountains to go along with pools and spas he’s done. In this case, he was installing a lap pool and wanted our help in what he could only describe as an extremely unusual watershape. The client said he had just built a beautiful contemporary home and, as an astronomy buff, wanted to complete the package with
In the world of concrete science and application, innumerable variables have an influence on whether a concrete installation is successful or not. These include but are not limited to the skill of the applicator, the suitability of the mix design, the temperature at the time of application, the equipment used, the water-to-cement ratio and the size of the aggregate. For all the seeming complexity, however, the nature of the material itself invests the process with a few immovable facts. One of these directly undermines the swimming pool industry’s “standard” that calls for a compression strength of 2,500 pounds per square inch for pneumatically placed concrete (that is, gunite or shotcrete). It’s not because the standard is inadequate per se; rather, it’s because
Root Design has always focused on developing environments that delight, inspire and occasionally surprise clients, but the project seen in this, the first of two articles, may well be the company’s most elaborate to date. Here, Ben Dozier and Michael Percy describe what went into designing and building across the entire site, including the multiple watershapes that helped transform this estate into an oasis filled with plants, light, sounds and water. Although it doesn’t always work out this way, the best-case scenario for us at Root Design (Austin, Texas) is to accept full responsibility for all exterior spaces of a given property, from the footprint of the house out to the property lines. In these situations, our team is able to establish designs with wall-to-wall continuity in response to the environment, the architecture and our client’s wishes. We commit ourselves in these circumstances to taking homeowners and their guests on a journey, starting the moment they enter the property and moving all the way through to the yard’s farthest reaches and all the spaces in between. Along the way, they’ll enter a variety of small or large vignettes, conceal-and-reveal discoveries, dramatic focal points and multiple rewarding destinations – each conceptually linked as a coherent “whole.” In this case, we were called upon to
Wanting to soften and humanize the austere appearance of a new facility for homeless families, the benefactors of the Orange County Rescue Mission in Tustin, Calif., commissioned an unusual watershape. The idea pulled watershaper Mark Holden and project manager Jim Bucklin into a whirlwind in which they had to create unique systems to accommodate the world’s largest ceramic amphora – and do so within an extraordinarily tight deadline. What happens when one of the country’s wealthiest philanthropists provides funding for a truly unique art piece in support of a favorite cause? The short answer is, everyone jumps to make it happen. That was literally the situation when a nonprofit organization that serves the needs of homeless families received a donation from its largest benefactor to fund construction of an unusual fountain system. The waterfeature, we learned, was to support the world’s largest amphora, which at that time was just being completed by a Danish artist. Destined for the courtyard of a new facility about to be
It’s no secret that swimming pools have come a long way in recent years and are now graced with all sorts of features, functions and materials that, once rare or non-existent, have now become common and (in some cases) familiar. For all of that innovation, however, there really hasn’t been what one might call a re-imagining of the product or any fundamental reassessment of its nature. In fact, as we and certainly some prospective clients see it, there are problems with pools as they’re traditionally designed and built. For one thing, bathers with physical limitations have difficulty getting in and out of the typical pool. For another, pools take up a good bit of physical space, which is increasingly an issue as
Sometimes watershaping is so much fun that it seems less like a job than a labor of love. That was absolutely the case with the watershape pictured here: I was given free rein to do exactly what I thought was needed in collaboration with great clients and a wonderful project team on a spectacular property. And as if that wasn’t good enough, we ran into virtually no problems along the way, even though we were working in a city sometimes known for setting obstacles in the way of ambitious designs. We at Pure Water Pools (Costa Mesa, Calif.) get involved in numerous custom projects every year, and the work just seems to get more creative, interesting and satisfying as we move along. I’m not willing to say we’ve peaked by any stretch of the imagination, but it feels good to think that this may well be
There’s no doubt about it: Projects in which watershapers participate from the start in the overall design of a custom residence offer rare opportunities for creative integration that don’t come along very often. That was just the positive situation we encountered here – and the results are among the finest we’ve ever achieved. The project was organized by Lewis Bloom of Bloom Builders (Bethesda, Md.). We at Alpine Pool & Design (Annandale, Va.) have had the privilege of collaborating with him often through the past 20 years and have enjoyed a wonderful working relationship every step of the way. In this case, we were asked to get involved with a spec house he wanted to build on a steeply sloping, heavily wooded lot overlooking the Potomac River as it passes through Bethesda. Heading the design team was a prominent local architect, Robert M. Gurney, who has earned a reputation for beautiful Contemporary approaches to both residential and commercial projects. More to the point, he’s also known for his ability to maximize connections between built spaces and the areas that surround them. Everything seemed to mesh, and we
Through the past few years, a number of my most interesting projects have been all about revising outdoor environments for upscale residential clients, generally with the thought in my mind of integrating exterior and interior spaces. That seems simple enough, but these tasks have frequently been complicated by unusual site features and the fact that what clients want at the outset isn’t exactly what the site seems to require. In a few of these situations, I’ve needed to reset the stage entirely by remodeling significant architectural elements of the house to fuse indoor and outdoor spaces; in others, I’ve had to revise and reconfigure everything on site except the house. As I roll through these various scenarios, the thought I always keep uppermost in mind has to do with making everything seem as though
Every so often, our company is confronted by the belief among certain design professionals that, as it is used by the pool industry, shotcrete is simply not viable for use as structural concrete in high-profile watershaping projects. The assumption, I’ve learned, is that the pool industry is filled with contractors and specification writers who know little about the material and therefore tend to produce substandard results. I could argue the merits of the case, but let it suffice to say that the upshot of this widespread belief is that institutions and commercial clients hesitate to use shotcrete and instead prefer cast-in-place concrete, which they perceive as having greater quality and reliability in watershape applications. We at Drakeley Swimming Pool Co. (Bethlehem, Conn.) recently encountered exactly that prejudice: A private high school that was in the process of designing and building a state-of-the-art aquatic center and an
From its very first issue, this magazine has made one key point over and over again: Soil conditions determine the way a watershape’s shell is constructed; to achieve success in construction, the approach must be established by a competent engineer and followed on site. Through the years, numerous contributors to the magazine have described the process of placing watershapes on hillsides or dealing with soil conditions that lead to differential settlement. So far, however, relatively little attention has been paid to the challenges of working in locations where
