spa
It seems like ages ago, those glowing days when a spa – whether separate from or connected somehow to a swimming pool – stood on the absolute cutting edge of residential watershaping. These days, by contrast, systems designed to deliver hot water and hydrotherapy to our clients have become so familiar that they’re almost taken for granted. From what I’ve heard, it’s almost reached the point where discussions leading up to some of the best custom projects are treating spas as
With watershapes, sometimes the most straightforward forms work out best. That was definitely the case with this project, a swimming pool I designed and built for a beach club near my home in Guanacaste, Costa Rica. The club is part of an overall resort property known as Reserva Conchal, an utterly spectacular spread covering 2,500 acres on scenic Playa Conchal on our country’s north Pacific coast. I first became involved with the resort’s owners about ten years ago, when they were completing their first phase and I helped them solve some problems with a pool that had been built by another firm. Since then, as the owners’ master plan has gradually unfolded, I’ve worked with them on a number of pools in various spots around the huge property, including watershapes for various condominiums and other facilities. My involvement with their newly constructed club has been, by far, the most
Root Design has always focused on developing environments that delight, inspire and occasionally surprise clients, but the project seen in this, the first of two articles, may well be the company’s most elaborate to date. Here, Ben Dozier and Michael Percy describe what went into designing and building across the entire site, including the multiple watershapes that helped transform this estate into an oasis filled with plants, light, sounds and water. Although it doesn’t always work out this way, the best-case scenario for us at Root Design (Austin, Texas) is to accept full responsibility for all exterior spaces of a given property, from the footprint of the house out to the property lines. In these situations, our team is able to establish designs with wall-to-wall continuity in response to the environment, the architecture and our client’s wishes. We commit ourselves in these circumstances to taking homeowners and their guests on a journey, starting the moment they enter the property and moving all the way through to the yard’s farthest reaches and all the spaces in between. Along the way, they’ll enter a variety of small or large vignettes, conceal-and-reveal discoveries, dramatic focal points and multiple rewarding destinations – each conceptually linked as a coherent “whole.” In this case, we were called upon to
Through the past few years, a number of my most interesting projects have been all about revising outdoor environments for upscale residential clients, generally with the thought in my mind of integrating exterior and interior spaces. That seems simple enough, but these tasks have frequently been complicated by unusual site features and the fact that what clients want at the outset isn’t exactly what the site seems to require. In a few of these situations, I’ve needed to reset the stage entirely by remodeling significant architectural elements of the house to fuse indoor and outdoor spaces; in others, I’ve had to revise and reconfigure everything on site except the house. As I roll through these various scenarios, the thought I always keep uppermost in mind has to do with making everything seem as though
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
Most of the time, residential construction projects that stretch beyond a half-decade in the making involve significant delays or work stoppages. The project pictured here – known hereabouts as “The Shell Pool” – took nearly six years to complete, and what’s unusual about it is that it was basically a continuous effort. Even when we weren’t on site, seldom did a day go by when we weren’t involved on some level in design work, engineering and/or project planning. Now that it’s finished, I can say without hesitation that this was the most detailed, refined, all-consuming project we at Platinum Poolcare Aquatech of Wheeling, Ill., have ever tackled. I can’t begin to calculate the collective number of hours spent in client and staff meetings, phone conversations, skull sessions and design-revision meetings – and that doesn’t include time spent on site in bringing this amazing project to fruition. Even compared to the many intricate commercial projects we’ve worked on through the years, this one set a new standard in my experience with respect both to the spirit of innovation and the mountains of patience required to get the job done. Today, with all that effort behind us, it’s a rare pleasure to
Sometimes, the main idea that will drive a design jumps to mind as soon as you see the site. That was the case with the project covered here: When I pulled up to the gate of the property - high in the affluent hills of Bel Air, Calif. - what I found wasn't a big, showy home of the sort that have increasingly come to characterize the neighborhood; instead, what I saw was a place defined by subtlety and elegance. It all started with the gate's beautiful brick pilaster, beyond which I could just glimpse a large, lovely home with the distinctive architecture of an English manor house. Even though I hadn't met the clients yet or seen the entire job site, I was already convinced that the project would be
Sometimes, the main idea that will drive a design jumps to mind as soon as you see the site. That was the case with the project covered here: When I pulled up to the gate of the property - high in the affluent hills of Bel Air, Calif. - what I found wasn't a big, showy home of the sort that have increasingly come to characterize the neighborhood; instead, what I saw was a place defined by subtlety and elegance. It all started with the gate's beautiful brick pilaster, beyond which I could just glimpse a large, lovely home with the distinctive architecture of an English manor house. Even though I hadn't met the clients yet or seen the entire job site, I was already convinced that the project would be
One of the things I love about working in the southwest is the way the openness and rugged, sculptural appearance of the natural landscape opens the door to those who want to make bold architectural statements in concrete, stone, steel and glass. Even the plants here have an overtly sculpted quality. I appreciate this all the more by virtue of having worked in more tradition-bound places: Here in the southwest, I feel free to use a strong, contemporary design vocabulary in forging unique connections between built spaces and their dramatic surroundings. Although I'm perfectly comfortable working in those traditional styles, I'll admit to being heavily influenced by the masters of Modernism - particularly Frank Lloyd Wright and the German-born American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe - and love the way those amazing mid-20th-century designers used clear, sculptural geometries to direct the eye and define intricate spatial relationships. The project depicted here is a direct channeling of their influence, aided and abetted by
I see gardens as entire worlds unto themselves - as complete and alive and distinct rather than as simple decorative extensions of architecture. Whatever form they might take, these spaces should carry us back into the peaceful parts of ourselves and to the calm, clear realms of our minds and spirits. This outlook has, in my role as founder and principal of Marpa Design Studio of Boulder, Colo., led me to consider landscapes as integrated wholes rather than as cobbled assemblies of solutions to various problems. It's a positive philosophy and design approach that is fully on display in the project depicted on these pages. I was recommended by the architect, who was working with the owners of this sprawling Rocky Mountain estate on a major renovation of both the home and the surrounding land. From the start, I was told there was just one major theme in mind: The home and its surroundings were to look as natural as possible - as though everything had arisen organically from the roots of the mountains. Neither house nor grounds possessed that spirit at the time, and the landscape was particularly deficient. Indeed, the only pre-existing feature was a cracked
