design
One thing I can safely say about the California city where I grew up is that it's a lot different from what it was like when I was a kid. Back in the 1960s, the area across from Santa Monica's City Hall was a mass of parking lots, office buildings and other hard, unattractive surfaces. The famed Civic Auditorium was at one end of the street, and a Moderne-style
We may have wrapped up the project discussed here more than five years ago, but I still see this backyard almost every time I take clients around to see examples of our work. The way I figure it, there's no better way to start a portfolio tour than by knocking prospects' socks off. There's lots of cool stuff going on here, some of which can readily be seen: the sweeping, Lautner-style perimeter-overflow edge around much of the free-form pool; the glorious water-on-water vanishing edge overlooking a large pond; a nice, full-featured spa; and the floating
Paramount Pool & Spa Systems (Chandler, AZ) makes the Parascope, a telescoping waterfeature that rises…
Through the years, Bruce Zaretsky has designed enough healing gardens that he knows just how comforting they can be for patients, caregivers and loved ones. But they only work, he notes, when designers keep some basic principles and several user-specific design factors in mind.
It started as a trickle and then became a flood unlike anything I've witnessed in more than 30 years of focusing on watershapes. Almost every spring since 1986, I've encountered photo features in magazines (and now on web sites) purporting to cover either
Diamond Spas (Broomfield, CO) offers custom spas and hot tubs made from copper, a material…
‘I take a lot of pictures of my work – so many, in fact, that friends and colleagues often tease me about it.’ That’s how David Tisherman opened his Details column of June 2003, broaching a subject near and dear to his heart. ‘[W]hat may seem like an obsession to others seems like good, commonsense business practice to me. In fact,’ he continued, ‘I believe that every single designer and builder involved in the creation of quality watershapes should record his or her work photographically – and should make a point of doing so in a way that
Safety is never far from my mind as I design for my clients, but as important as it is, it's seldom the only thing on my mind as a project comes together. In fact, balancing the need for features we must include for safety's sake with our everyday passion about never compromising on aesthetics is something I consider with every detail. Whether it's the extent to which
In the last video I shared with you, I relayed information about upgrading a do-it-yourself pond into a watergarden that exemplifies the value of an informed, professional touch. This time, a pond we updated was large enough that I know it was installed by a professional - but one who at the time seems to have been a bit lacking in insight and imagination. There's only a brief glimpse of
