vanishing edge
In recent years, I've become increasingly focused on landing projects on St. Thomas, St. John and a bunch of other paradisal surface eruptions off the east coast of North America: I like the people, enjoy the climate and truly love the laid-back island culture I find even among the high-end clients who call on me to design their poolscapes. Quite often, the settings are the far side of spectacular, too, with views of multi-hued coastal waters of the Atlantic Ocean stretching out for miles, often interrupted by
From the start, this project was all about the view: The property sits above Lake Moumelle about 30 minutes outside Little Rock, Ark., in a small town called Roland. The lake serves as the primary reservoir for the state capital, so the waters are as serene and pristine as can be - no fishing, no boats, just thousands of acres of uninterrupted serenity. We at J. Brownlee Design (Nashville, Tenn.) had been asked to design the exteriors for a new home that was then under construction on the site. The homeowners, a couple with two children, and wanted a space that would be
There are two common options when it's time to design the wall for a vanishing-edge swimming pool: cut it in or cut it away. With a cut-in approach, the top of the wall is cut down into the pool so that the water surface extends to the outside edge of the wall - effectively submerging it even when the water is not flowing over the edge. By contrast, a cut-away wall is one where the top of the wall angles down and away from the pool so that the water surface terminates at the inside edge of the wall. This results in the
This project started with an unexpected phone call. The clients, who live in Iowa much of the year but have a second home on the water's edge in Tampa Bay, had spotted a Wall Street Journal article in which a photograph of a swimming pool with a "floating" fire pit had been included. They loved the look and figured they could use it to dress up the poolscape that had come with their Florida retreat - if only they could find a local company to do it! Looking through the text, she spotted a reference to the fact that we at Ryan Hughes|Design|Build had designed and competed the project that
In recent years, I've had the good fortune to tackle a number of watershaping projects in the islands off the coast of eastern North America. From the West Indies to the Caribbean, I've learned in pursuing these projects that fresh water and electricity can be amazingly expensive commodities. These are, of course, settings in which numerous clients want to take advantage of water-on-water views. Trouble is, the vanishing edges that achieve these effects are questionable choices where the energy required to run them is costly; where winds and evaporation
As a matter of habit and long practice, my design process for an outdoor environment begins the moment I arrive on site, starting with an assessment of the property's physical qualities. Indeed, before I let structures, features and visual details start dancing in my head, I focus on grading, drainage and basic spatial relationships. In my experience, this overview of the practicalities will help drive the design - and allow the aesthetic decisions to flow smoothly into view at the appropriate time. In the case of the project that's been under discussion through this string of four articles, for example, my early assessment of
