quarry
The availability of new and different materials has been a driving force behind the design revolution that has defined the watershaping industry for the past ten years. One key to that development, observes Kirk Butler of Cactus Stone & Tile, has been the willingness of suppliers to step into more progressive roles as purveyors of unique products that have blown the creative process wide open for watershape designers and builders – and their clients. In our business as a stone and tile supplier, we’ve often heard in the past 35 years that designers and contractors get tired of repetition: They come to us, they say, hoping to find things that inspire them to create projects that are new, unique and exciting. Frankly, we on the supply side are subject to the same sentiment: While we may be intimately familiar with materials our designers and builders have used over and over again and have no objection to working with the tried and true, we’re restless, too, and are always trying to find something new to bring to the table. Whether we’re working with a pool designer, a landscape architect, an interior designer, a home builder or even a homeowner, we believe everyone benefits from access to a wide array of quality products and materials. In our case at Cactus Stone & Tile (Phoenix, Ariz.), this means we literally travel the world to find and procure the widest possible range of hard-surface products, be it stone or tile. We beat the bushes across Europe and Asia and visit the far reaches of South America, dropping in on trade shows and fairs, introducing ourselves at quarries and processing facilities and doing whatever it takes to
Natural stone is certainly the most time-honored of all building materials. From the pyramids of Egypt to the temples and civic buildings of ancient Greece and Rome; from the palaces and villas of the Renaissance to the most contemporary structures of our modern era, we see a material forged within the earth for millions of years that has been painstakingly quarried and shaped into myriad forms both functional and decorative. Even with the advent of cementitious components and a range of other manufactured substitutes, stone remains the material of choice in a great many applications. In fact, the range of natural stone materials available to designers and builders expands almost daily in response to the specific demands of watershapers and other designers and contractors - and there's no end in sight. Our company, tr stone, is a U.S. distribution facility owned and operated by one of the world's largest stone producers, Tureks, based in Afyon, Turkey. The best thing about the marketplace from the perspective of designers and builders is that high-quality stone is now available from a wide range of domestic and foreign sources in a number of distinctive
After a long, mostly weather-related break, it's finally time to return to the rolling hills near Hanover, Pa., and the huge, multi-phase watershaping project I began discussing in the fall of 2003. When we last visited the project in February 2004 (page 22), the primary gunite structures were in place; we are now proceeding with the meticulous work that will give the project its visual appeal. Even in unfinished condition, the pool complex is pretty impressive: a big, free-form vessel with a variety of features including an island spa, an enormous associated waterfeature, bridges and a range of bells and whistles I'll discuss in upcoming columns as the project draws to a close. As previously discussed, one of the defining design elements on this project is the extensive use of natural boulders and large expanses of stone decking. Even without the weather delays, these project phases alone have turned into
