installation
An Interview by Lenny Giteck From a very young age, Steve Sandalis was fascinated by natural waterfeatures — an early interest that years later led him to found his watershaping company, Mystic Water Gardens. The Encino, Calif.-based business has prospered mainly by designing and building high-end waterfeatures for the wealthy elite of Los Angeles, including major figures in the entertainment industry. Many of Mystic's projects, which mostly come through word-of-mouth referrals, have carried six-figure price tags, including one that ran
As I mention at the start of this video, setting the edges is just about my favorite part of the pond-installation process. As is true with juggling and placing big rocks, there's an art to getting things just right and making the setting look as natural as possible - that is, as though the pond not only belongs there but has also been there for uncounted years.. As the video discusses, there are
Earlier in this sequence of articles and videos, I mentioned how much I enjoy the fact that pond installation is an improvisational art form: You can roll through a design in your head and sketch it until your pencils are worn to nubs, but the reality is that working with boulders is a process of placement and on-site adjustment that ultimately brings a design vision to life. That's particularly true with waterfalls, which is why this single part of the series encompasses four videos and nearly 40 minutes of running time. And as you will notice, there are probably more
I've always been a demon when it comes to getting everything having to do with my pond skimmers right: If they're set up properly, they'll work so well that you rarely need to think about them - and that's always my goal, both for me and for my clients. Trouble is, you usually end up securing the liner to the faceplate at a fairly awkward point in
Of all the new twists that have been added to the realm of swimming pool design in the last dozen or so years, one of my very favorites is on display in this video. I absolutely love the way acrylic walls add an exclamation point to just about any suitable project. I'm also of the opinion that, as watershape designers, we're only beginning to scratch the surface when it comes to exploiting their potential in our
A surprising number of my clients come into the pond-buying process without having given any thought at all to how the watershape will look after the sun goes down. That probably has something to do with the fact that the big natural ponds they've encountered in their lifetimes have not benefited from any kind of illumination beyond the occasional pole-mounted floodlight. So they're in for a treat when we complete their pond and they watch it
Chatting with ‘The Pond Guy’