decking
With hillside projects, it's generally true that lines of sight mean everything. No matter whether the views are up close or in the far distance, no matter if the space looks out over water, trees, rugged terrain or other structures, a design wins huge style points (and a client's gratitude) if you are conscious of the way your watershapes fit into their environments. The project covered in this article had almost every advantage in the view department. Set on a slope overlooking the Pacific Ocean at Dana Point, Calif., the home sits
Poolstones by Sofikitis (Monterey, CA) has published a catalog covering its current collection of stone…
One of the nicest days I've ever spent as publisher of WaterShapes came when I joined editor Eric Herman and our good friend William Rowley on the beach in Santa Monica, Calif., one spring day in 2006. Bill was working there on the resuscitation of the swimming pool at the old Marion Davies estate. In the 1920s, she had been William Randolph Hearst's paramour. When she wanted a house built on
It’s not often that a watershaper tackles a job that takes more than two years of complete, full-time effort, but that’s been the case for the project pictured here. For nearly two and a half years, in fact, I devoted virtually all of my working life to this single backyard watershape environment, and as I’ve mentioned in previous articles, there were times when I wondered if I was crazy to get involved with a project of this scope. Indeed, to describe it simply as a “backyard watershape environment” is to fall miles short of conveying the complexity of the systems covered in two previous WaterShapes articles (“When Dreams Grow,” April 2008, click here; and “Layering the Experience,” July 2008, click here): It was a monster project, and there were times I thought the beast had me at a distinct disadvantage. You know all about that, of course, if you’ve followed this sequence of articles, so I won’t belabor the point. Here, we’ll wrap things up by letting the photographs tell most of the story – although I must say the images don’t quite
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As a rule, I avoid working for contractors: I’ve found that far too many of them spend so much time worrying about the bottom line that they lose sight of the fact that their clients want quality rather than compromises. I’ve also found that their general caution is often at its worst when it comes to watershapes: Even though these structures may be key components of the overall project, they tend to come along late in the process and are all too often seen as places where corners can be cut to meet overall budget goals. Frankly, I’ve never liked being treated as a pawn or second-class citizen, so I avoid these situations like the plague. Instead, I typically work directly for homeowners and refuse to subordinate my part of a project to the whims of another contractor. Any worthwhile rule, however, has
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
