engineering
From the start, this project was all about the view: The property sits above Lake Moumelle about 30 minutes outside Little Rock, Ark., in a small town called Roland. The lake serves as the primary reservoir for the state capital, so the waters are as serene and pristine as can be - no fishing, no boats, just thousands of acres of uninterrupted serenity. We at J. Brownlee Design (Nashville, Tenn.) had been asked to design the exteriors for a new home that was then under construction on the site. The homeowners, a couple with two children, and wanted a space that would be
An Interview with Paul Fischman by Andrew Kaner Through the years, we at Aquatic Consultants (Miami, Fla.) have formed bonds with several architects and landscape architects whose efforts we support with plans and details for the aquatic systems they're including in their projects. In that capacity, we have worked with Paul Fischman with some frequency. He's a partner at Choeff Levy Fischman, a Miami-based architecture firm, and in the past eight years we have seen our relationship grow to a point where we now consider
This was a fun one - a project that was fully within our comfort zone but pushed us into new territory and gave us an opportunity to shine in a unique design context. We had worked with the property-management firm before, and they called us in to have a look at a large space behind a multi-story office building in Overland Park, Kans., where we were also to meet with the building's owner and some of the project's stakeholders. We had done well in our
There are two common options when it's time to design the wall for a vanishing-edge swimming pool: cut it in or cut it away. With a cut-in approach, the top of the wall is cut down into the pool so that the water surface extends to the outside edge of the wall - effectively submerging it even when the water is not flowing over the edge. By contrast, a cut-away wall is one where the top of the wall angles down and away from the pool so that the water surface terminates at the inside edge of the wall. This results in the
This project started with an unexpected phone call. The clients, who live in Iowa much of the year but have a second home on the water's edge in Tampa Bay, had spotted a Wall Street Journal article in which a photograph of a swimming pool with a "floating" fire pit had been included. They loved the look and figured they could use it to dress up the poolscape that had come with their Florida retreat - if only they could find a local company to do it! Looking through the text, she spotted a reference to the fact that we at Ryan Hughes|Design|Build had designed and competed the project that
Pond installation offers lots of opportunities for straying off the naturalistic path, but to me, there's no more problematic detour than the unfortunate "string-of-pearls" effect. When this happens, the edge of a pond looks more like Wilma Flintstone's rocky necklace than it does like the banks of a natural body of water. And it's a double shame, because the installer went to all the trouble of sourcing and placing natural material - but ended up with completely unnatural results. I've seen too many of these nightmare ponds through the years. Some are the result of a do-it-yourselfer's lack of awareness. It also happens with
As a company that's been around for many years in the landscape and pool trades, we knew as we expanded our offerings to include fountain restoration, design and installation that experience and contacts would eventually lead to referrals. What's been unexpected given our past work with mainly residential clients is that fact that our fountain referrals have come in bunches as we work with developers and architects and get involved in
