swim-up bar
While the term “swimming pool” is indelibly ingrained as the common descriptor of watershapes large…
I love it when a project teaches me a lesson about my design process. In this case, it was just a smallish insight - but it had a profound effect on the outcome just the same. I'd seen this property for the first time while the home was under construction. It was a large building, about three-quarters complete, that occupied most of a fairly large parcel. The clients were happy to show me around, let me figure things out and come
Who says you have to live in the Rockies to get the perfect mountain home? These clients are living that dream just outside Kansas City, Mo. Not long ago, they purchased land north of the Missouri River near Smithville, a rural outpost known for its rolling hills, plentiful trees and tobacco farms. It's a place where relatively low-cost land is still available, and people have started buying acreage and building their
The modern concept of "outdoor living" took hold a long time ago - the very first time a homeowner set up a barbecue grill somewhere near the backyard pool, then figured out a way to enjoy a family meal al fresco. This sort of casual and mostly seasonal approach held on for decades, but approaches to outdoor living took a giant leap forward in the 1990s, when swimming pools started being joined in increasing numbers of backyards by
As a designer, I am quite familiar with projects that involve a good bit of give and take between me and my clients. You know how it goes: the typical process of success by approximation as you work through sets of possibilities and navigate around a couple dead ends before a design is approved and accepted. In a WaterShapes article earlier this year, for instance, I wrote about the ordeal of developing seven distinct
Since the very beginning, WaterShapes has been a strong advocate for the importance of working in context and making certain that what's done with a watershape, its landscape and various exterior amenities all align in fairly specific ways with the architecture of a home and the nature of its surroundings. I'm all for that in principle and toe the line carefully in almost all of the projects I pursue. But it's only almost, because in select sets of circumstances, creating
It’s not often that a watershaper tackles a job that takes more than two years of complete, full-time effort, but that’s been the case for the project pictured here. For nearly two and a half years, in fact, I devoted virtually all of my working life to this single backyard watershape environment, and as I’ve mentioned in previous articles, there were times when I wondered if I was crazy to get involved with a project of this scope. Indeed, to describe it simply as a “backyard watershape environment” is to fall miles short of conveying the complexity of the systems covered in two previous WaterShapes articles (“When Dreams Grow,” April 2008, click here; and “Layering the Experience,” July 2008, click here): It was a monster project, and there were times I thought the beast had me at a distinct disadvantage. You know all about that, of course, if you’ve followed this sequence of articles, so I won’t belabor the point. Here, we’ll wrap things up by letting the photographs tell most of the story – although I must say the images don’t quite
It’s a project I won’t soon forget, believe me. In the April 2008 issue of WaterShapes, I offered the first of what ultimately will be three articles on an enormously ambitious project I began working on more than two years ago. In that span, I’ve found myself taking whatever solace I can from the fact that everyone who’s become involved with the project (or has even heard about it in any detail) concedes that it’s probably the most complicated backyard watershape they’ve ever encountered. Last time, I covered the scope of the project in general terms, outlining the design-development process and rolling through some of the more intricate details of the early construction phases. This time, we’ll move along to take a close look at the multiple water systems and effects and the hydraulic approaches needed to make them all work. (In thinking things through in preparation for writing this article, I began to suspect that there might be enough here to fill a small book; being a merciful soul, however, I’ll stick to the key points and keep things moving.) To recap briefly: The project features
Some clients don’t know any limits when it comes to their ambitions – and that’s certainly been true in this case. His mountain-sized home is set on a relatively flat four-acre parcel in otherwise hilly Ramona, Calif. The client himself describes the building as looking like a casino, and indeed it does have a decidedly “eclectic” architectural look. What he wanted was a backyard to match – a free-wheeling composition that might best be described as a Tommy Bahama-inspired tropical resort. He let me know that the family
