custom
Artistry In Mosaics (Fort Pierce, FL) has published Mosaic Tile Master Catalog No. 28 in…
Inter-Fab (Tucson, AZ) has expanded its rail-fabrication services and now offers designers and builders the…
How do you tear kids away from the Internet or video games on a nice summer day and get them outside to play? These days, more and more families are answering that question by creating small-scale waterparks in their own backyards. The great thing is, these micro-waterparks don’t have to be as garish or visually aggressive as their full-scale commercial counterparts. In fact, these spaces can be as easy on the eye as the watershapes at luxury resorts and hotels: Indeed, those are just the
Almost every advertisement for watershapes I’ve ever seen in a newspaper or the Yellow Pages says something about “custom” this or “custom” that. It always leads me to wonder how to differentiate between the “custom,” “high-end” and “luxury” pools others devise and the “architectural pools” or, better yet, the “aquatic art” I strive to create. I prefer the last two terms because
Most of the time, residential construction projects that stretch beyond a half-decade in the making involve significant delays or work stoppages. The project pictured here – known hereabouts as “The Shell Pool” – took nearly six years to complete, and what’s unusual about it is that it was basically a continuous effort. Even when we weren’t on site, seldom did a day go by when we weren’t involved on some level in design work, engineering and/or project planning. Now that it’s finished, I can say without hesitation that this was the most detailed, refined, all-consuming project we at Platinum Poolcare Aquatech of Wheeling, Ill., have ever tackled. I can’t begin to calculate the collective number of hours spent in client and staff meetings, phone conversations, skull sessions and design-revision meetings – and that doesn’t include time spent on site in bringing this amazing project to fruition. Even compared to the many intricate commercial projects we’ve worked on through the years, this one set a new standard in my experience with respect both to the spirit of innovation and the mountains of patience required to get the job done. Today, with all that effort behind us, it’s a rare pleasure to
For all the talk about the spectrum of watershaping - the existence of those who, on one extreme, pursue high-quality, truly custom projects and those on the other who live in a low-end, cookie-cutter realm - I must say that I've yet to run into anyone from the fringes of latter camp who's stepped forward to say, "Yes, our company crawls in the dirt to win jobs based purely on price, and it's only possible because we deliberately do substandard work." Quite to the contrary, people in the watershaping business at all levels will tell you that they're in business to provide a quality end product that delivers real value to clients whether the average cost of their output is
For all the talk about the spectrum of watershaping - the existence of those who, on one extreme, pursue high-quality, truly custom projects and those on the other who live in a low-end, cookie-cutter realm - I must say that I've yet to run into anyone from the fringes of latter camp who's stepped forward to say, "Yes, our company crawls in the dirt to win jobs based purely on price, and it's only possible because we deliberately do substandard work." Quite to the contrary, people in the watershaping business at all levels will tell you that they're in business to provide a quality end product that delivers real value to clients whether the average cost of their output is
I've seen many changes in the 38 years I've been installing vinyl-liner pools. When I started out, we worked mostly with wooden walls, and I even recall some made with asbestos. We always did our best, but I'll concede that in those early days the construction techniques were relatively unsophisticated. These days, we at The Pool & Spa Doctor (Wall, N.J.) work mostly with galvanized-steel construction and, in a smaller percentage of projects, with either modular polymer or fiberglass systems. We've been at it long enough in our market that, through the years, we've gone in and replaced many of the old wooden walls with modern modular systems - an experience that always drives home for us the fact that the
I've seen many changes in the 38 years I've been installing vinyl-liner pools. When I started out, we worked mostly with wooden walls, and I even recall some made with asbestos. We always did our best, but I'll concede that in those early days the construction techniques were relatively unsophisticated. These days, we at The Pool & Spa Doctor (Wall, N.J.) work mostly with galvanized-steel construction and, in a smaller percentage of projects, with either modular polymer or fiberglass systems. We've been at it long enough in our market that, through the years, we've gone in and replaced many of the old wooden walls with modern modular systems - an experience that always drives home for us the fact that the
