retaining walls
One of the important lessons I learned as a young watershaper is that I am not a surveyor. Working on a pool design in the hills south of California's Napa Valley many, many years ago, I found myself on a sloping lot, broke out my line level and figured I could, with some patience and care, map all of the relevant elevations and develop a suitable design based on my observations of the contours. As it turned out, I was
For me and my business in around 2008, this project was a real rite of passage. At that point, pool-construction and shotcrete-application companies like ours were well established and had lineages stretching back to the 1950s. Just the same, we were having a hard time gaining recognition from architects, landscape architects and developers who were pursuing quality, prestige construction. The irony is, my own firm had
This is the story of the rebirth of a pool - and then some. It all started when I was contacted by a homeowner who was in what I'd call perfectly reasonable distress: His swimming pool was a mess, he told me, surrounded by cracked decking, a crumbling slide structure and a deteriorating fireplace. He'd already spent a bundle on piers and other fixes recommended by engineers, hoping to
'For years,' wrote Bruce Zaretsky to open his On the Level column in the January 2011 edition, WaterShapes 'has celebrated the beauty, majesty and positive potential of water in the landscape. We've seen it flowing down waterfalls, over vanishing edges, across slopes and through the air. We've seen what happens to colors immersed in it, how it creates shimmering light patterns, how it works its way over stone and, perhaps most important, the
The key to good pond-filter/waterfall installation is making certain the area around the unit is well compacted, well supported and properly positioned. If you take care of all of those things, the system that drives the pond will be stable and offer trouble-free performance for many years to come. In this video, we look with special focus at one of the support systems we see as crucial to many of our successes – that is, a good retaining wall that will help keep
