WaterShapes
S.R. Smith (Canby, OR) manufactures the Destination Lounger. Designed for light weight and durability, the…
Bobé Water & Fire (Phoenix, AZ) now offers the Builder Series, which combines water and…
Water Odyssey (San Marcos, TX) has released Mushroom Maze, a spray feature for splash pads…
Hayward Pool Products (Elizabeth, NJ) has launched the AquaVac 6 Series of robotic pool cleaners.…
'Until quite recently,' declared Brian Van Bower in opening his October 2009 Aqua Culture column, 'it was difficult to find too many people in the watershaping industry who were willing to say much about "going green." 'For a while now, I've thought that was a mistake: It's been manifestly clear for several years that practices and programs related to energy conservation, water conservation and an overall sense of environmental responsibility are here to stay, and I always think it's better to
It's the nature of the game: One of the great sources of pride for any good watershaping business has to do with its ability to find solutions to difficult challenges - a new way to achieve something familiar when the established or conventional approach won't work, for example, or dealing with site constraints that repeatedly send you back to the drawing board. That's the sort of pride we had coming out of our work on the Arthur J. Will Memorial Fountain and its accompanying splash pad at Grand Park in Los Angeles, and it was intensified by the fact that this was the restoration of a 60-year-old fountain that had originally been built with an entirely different approach from anything we'd consider today - but whose physical constraints we couldn't
For most of my professional life, I've worked on projects in which the dominant color is green. With the project under discussion here, however, both the client and the setting called for something quite different. As I knew going in, the property, located in Northridge, Calif., is both a residence and a place of business, so on any given workday multiple cars and trucks invade the space and need convenient places to park. But while this primary use of a plaza-scale space as a parking pad suited clients' business needs, it was plainly too dusty and downright bleak to offer any
What's involved in a good landscape-lighting project? Whole books have been written on this topic, and it's not hard to find week-long workshops devoted to showing professionals how to produce finely illuminated environments for their clients. If you're a designer or a design-oriented contractor, however, I'd suggest that you have enough of a head start that we can set you off in a good direction with this brief article and its focus on the features of a good lighting program. You already think like an artist, which is great, and know how to identify focal points and
My last blog - the one about the emergence of Ask the Masters and Watershape University as evolutionary extensions of the Genesis movement - was written when I had no inkling there would be more big news coming. But come it did, when Skip Phillips announced late in September that he was
