expertise
Relatively speaking, building a Koi pond is often the easy part. The tough part? Working with clients to select the fish who will call the new watershape "home." I have to say that I've been bitten hard by the Koi bug and have spent countless hours learning as much as I can about these beautiful fish. It's a level of involvement that
In last month's "Detail," I discussed the beginning stages of a new project that has my partner Kevin Fleming and me pretty excited. At this point, the pool's been shot and we're moving along at a good pace. I'll pick up that project again in upcoming issues, but I've brought it up briefly here to launch into a discussion about something in our industry that mystifies me almost on a daily basis. So far, the work we've done on the oceanfront renovation project has been focused on a relatively narrow band of design considerations having to do with the watershape and its associated structures. This focus is
One of my least favorite activities is testifying as an expert witness in legal disputes over watershaping projects gone awry. As a rule, I try to stay out of courtrooms for any reason, but from time to time, I reluctantly agree to offer my opinion as a witness if I think I can help generate a fair outcome. Despite my best intentions, however, I seldom see it as time well spent. The process is often stressful, and I know deep down, regardless of who's right and who's wrong, that lawsuits are
I started my May 2001 column by expressing the belief that watershape designers should be paid for their designs in the same way interior designers and landscape designers are paid for theirs - and by indicating that lots of watershapers I've met are interested in knowing more about the mechanics of how this works. I put off addressing those issues last time because I saw a need to establish criteria for offering such services in the first place. In other words, there's much more to being a watershape designer than simply declaring yourself to be one, and I set up two dozen questions intended to clarify what I meant. Once you've answered those questions predominantly in the affirmative, once you've determined, through
Contrary to the impression that might be given by the headline, this isn't an article about building arbors that are safe. Rather, it's about how you can protect your clients and their guests from the sun by building beautiful structures in their yards. (Safety is part of the discussion, too, but not its focus.) I bring this up because many clients put piles of money into building spectacular pools but fail to give much thought to their surroundings. That's a shame, because those surroundings almost certainly will be seen much more than the pools will be used in the course of the average year. Several things need to be
For me, the simplicity and elegance of the International Style was just about the best thing going in 20th-century design. The followers of Walter Gropius in the Bauhaus movement held this simplicity - expressed as a cleanness of line, a uniformity of materials and the establishment of clear relationships among architectural planes - in absolutely the highest regard. I always try to integrate these design principles into my own work - and one of the ways I do so is through the ledger detail we'll examine this time around. It's an expensive
