geometrical

The home sat above the shoreline of Seattle’s Mercer Island like a modern, angular beacon. The challenge, says watershape designer/builder Clayton Varick, was to weave the residence more successfully into its lakeside surroundings – a mission accomplished by setting up a string of pools, streams, waterfalls, ponds and plantings that effectively create transitions from the starkly geometrical to the breathtakingly natural.

Natural Transitions

Finding ways to blend the angular rhythms of modern architecture with the sweeping splendors of nature constitutes one of the more difficult challenges faced by today's watershapers. In the case of the project pictured on these pages, we were contacted in 2002 about an enormous, modern-style home on Mercer Island overlooking the shore of Lake Washington, right near Seattle. The property was being remodeled, and the owners wanted a set of watershapes that would enhance the beauty of the two-acre estate while more convincingly integrating the geometry of the structure with its woodsy lakefront setting. The solution: a set of watershapes that start near the house with perfect geometric forms that stick to the architect's original design, then moves down the hillside through various transitional stages to a pond feature that looks like part of