The Spirit of Avalon (Part II)
In the first installment of this two-part project Mario and Sherry Abaldo explained the scope and first stages of the work creating one of the most elaborate residential aquatic spaces of all time. Here they fill in many of the details that made this undertaking so remarkable.
By Mario Abaldo with Sherry Abaldo
Time seemed to move at light speed on this project. My daughter and son went from toddlers to kids. While I worked my 16-hour days, Sherry held down the fort in Maine – taking them outside at night to watch fireflies, at 4:00 a.m. to watch meteor showers; teaching them not to be afraid of thunderstorms, or of the bats whizzing by their ears at campfires much smaller than the ones I’d made.
They visited me often. We quickly fell in love with Kansas City. I stole time and made up for it later. We played in the fountains, hung out at Science City, ate the best steak ever. Turns out I only thought I knew how to barbecue. One of our favorite things was strolling around Country Club Plaza listening to live jazz on every other corner. Jazz became the soundtrack of the project – of life in general then.
As our work on this project moved forward, my relationship with the client became such that if either one of us got an idea, we would make it happen. We met just once a month, although it was a year before he toured the whole project in person.
One of my ideas was to put an eight-foot-wide underwater window in the lake. Accessed by a set of rock stairs, we created a recessed “Aquarium Lounge” for viewing fish, SCUBA divers, and so forth. It featured built-in seating, torches, and one of my favorite water features. For the latter, I cut up a big GFRC boulder and made an elevated water basin out of it.
I cut six long slices through the bottom so ribbons of water would spill down into a catch basin, from which the water would be pumped back up. The catch basin was also GFRC rock and had a submerged gas burner, so there could literally be fire on water. The six ribbons of water would catch the light from the fire below and flicker and be amazing.
CAVERNOUS CLARITY
We used biological filtration for the lake, creating bogs with bog plants, fish, seeded bacteria, special algae, and more. Mr. Langley’s biologist and I worked together. We built bogs everywhere we could to move the massive amount of water. It took a significant amount of time for the bog network to become a balanced ecosystem, with its relatively low slow flow through the plants and gravel.
We ended up having to augment the biological filtration. We filtered the lake water with resin beads in sand filter tanks. Then we ran it through large ozone generators in a dedicated room in the grotto (see below), and an industrial ultraviolet treatment system. We did not use chlorine or salt as it would be hazardous for fish and bogs.
The entire project, of course, was industrial scale with three-phase power and the monstrous backup generator.
LAVISH GROTTO
From the time Mr. Langley mentioned swimming in the winter, I envisioned putting the grotto inside a big rock mountain cave. I was thinking 150-foot-long-by-80-foot-wide, three stories, serious amenities inside. The kind of place where, if the world were going to end, you’d want to spend your final hours in this grotto.
First, we built an insane equipment room inside a poured concrete foundation, which was all below the lake. The equipment included pumps, filters, heaters, ozone, ultraviolet, all of the electrical including buckets, motor control panels, low voltage, and enhanced security.
The natural grade of the property sloped down toward Lake Quivira at the back, so to blend things in as much as possible, we covered the entire exposed back side of the foundation system with huge real boulders. This resulted in a sort of daylight basement. We added landscaping with quantities of vines for a softening effect.
The massive grotto structure, inside and out, is clad with meticulously detailed GFRC artificial rockwork, along with numerous features including a swim-in cave opening, hot tubs and cold plunges, extensive lighting and miles of plumbing.
The grotto walls were poured one lift at a time. We built three stories on top of the foundation. Then on top of the third story we used steel I-beams across the roof, corrugated metal decking, heavy rebar, and poured concrete composite floors which became the grotto ceiling, as well as the floor or deck of the outside roof.
The latter would hold roof-top and terraced pools (three-feet-deep with 30-foot-drop infinity edges) that fed the exterior waterfalls, a secluded hot tub, a bridge lined in fire troughs, landscaping including a putting green and full-grown trees, light wells, ventilation hubs, and sun decks. There were 30 built-in torch locations all over the mountain.
Once we did the grotto shell, we went inside and ran miles of high voltage, low voltage, fiber optics, communications, HVAC, drainage, winter crystal emitters, fog, mist tubing everywhere, water drainage for planters, security, and natural gas.
The logistics were complex to say the least. The interior grotto finish would be GFRC. We were building a mountain in the woods across a 30-foot-deep lake. We had gone beyond site drop-offs and man lifts. So once we built the grotto shell, we created a zipline from the roof of the grotto to the driveway of the main house, using steel I-beams and probably 500 feet of heavy duty steel cable. This enabled us to send GFRC and other material flying across the jobsite. It reduced a tremendous amount of loading and hauling.
We stockpiled all this material on the grotto roof. Material was also dropped and stockpiled inside. We built little cranes with five ton electric remote control winches on them, counterbalanced with cutoffs of steel I-beams, to lower the GFRC rock panels down the wall.
In addition, guys rappelled to do the work. They hung there in harnesses, bolting and anchoring the rock sections one by one. The sections averaged 300 pounds each. There would often be two guys rappelling and four guys craning material down. They did it like clockwork. It was like watching a circus.
FINDING OUR WAY
People were working all over the site continuously. Because of the client’s required schedule, there were no final plans as there would have been in a commercial project of this scale. It went beyond just practicing trades. The whole project became intuitive, where you don’t have all the exact details so things take shape as you build them.
We used GFRC walls and ceilings to make the inside of the grotto look like a rock cave. We poured concrete floors, stamped and carved like rock throughout. All this extended into a zero edge swimming pool in the main grotto, making it look like a mineral pool. By the pool we had hot and cold tubs nestled in the rocks. Some seats had 30 jets. We added “personal” waterfalls into the pool that, with the touch of a button, could be hot or cold as desired.
The project’s many special features include: an island in the lake, an “aquarium lounge”, bubbling mineral springs in the grotto, a mountain top hot tub and waterfall, a zip line, and numerous other features.
Ultimately the grotto filled the inside of the man-made mountain with its multiple levels. A highlight was the swim-through to the lake beneath a long curtained waterfall. In addition to the pool, hot tub, and cold tub, it featured a steam room, bar, changing room, bathroom, lounge, tunnel entry, and a loft above the pool with a 25-foot-high ceiling and a 10-foot waterfall. It also had misters that could create environments from spooky movie vapor to socked in New England fog as well as fire features.
The exterior of Langley Mountain needed so much GFRC coverage that I had to come up with some creative ways to make it look as realistic as possible. First, I used castings from actual rock formations, so you have the real deal only they are relatively lightweight, and can be put in places where you can’t feasibly do rock in terms of danger, cost, and time.
REPRESENTING NATURE
Next came the artistic challenge of trying to replicate what nature creates in the wild, and make it look seamless when done. The manufacturer of course offered a limited number of types of panels, probably 30. So how do you make it not look like a wallpaper pattern?
We took that GFRC and used every kind of panel they had – big, flat, small, anything – and we would flip, turn, spin, cut, and orient it for variety. We used it not only for this massive mountain but also for planters and the monkey grabs in the caverns mentioned earlier. We would cut a chunk off a section, turn it sideways, and put a sequence together that made the panels look like they had the same striation.
Another GFRC challenge with the mountain was how to get definition and relief against such a vast expanse. You could tilt and bolt a section 3’ out, and it would still look flat. Angling the sections was key here, as well as going for the striation effects. In some cases we would stair step the panels down so it looked like one long massive relief. Adding fissures and fractures helped a great deal.
Last but not least, the almost whole other art of coloring and shading the GFRC came into play. You had to think about what kind of rock you were trying to replicate. We used flat panels in the hallways of the equipment room and ozone generator room.
The project includes numerous waterfalls, streams and biological filtration bogs, weaving the sights and sounds of moving water throughout the massive property.
The planters presented challenges of their own. There was to be greenery all over the mountain. You had to think very far ahead in terms of getting drainage, irrigation, and light to where you wanted planters within the whole massive structure. Placement concerns included how far to pop the planters out, and enough distance from the waterfalls so they would not be deluged.
This brings me to what is probably my favorite element of the project – the main waterfall, over 30-feet tall, capable of 12,000 gallons per minute, powered by a series of 15 horsepower pumps. We called the big rock that it flows (or crashes) over “Pride Rock” – a 16-foot cantilever that I made from a massive GFRC boulder panel turned upside down. It was filled with tube steel and layers of rebar mats, then poured full of concrete, molded, carved, and stamped by hand.
I swam into that waterfall once, with four pumps on, in my SCUBA gear. I needed the SCUBA gear. It felt like Niagara Falls.
The mountain was also designed for rock climbing, and there are dive rock platforms at multiple levels throughout the mountain face, so you can dive in or next to the falls. I’ve gone flying off all of them.
I wanted the project to be four seasons, so we made the main waterfall a freeze feature as well. There are more than 6,000 misters on the mountain and icicle emitters for winter wonderlandscapes. My wife said my penchant for pulling over on drives and snapping photos of any kind of ice – or water, for that matter – seeping down rocks had finally paid off. In addition, the mountain created its own ecosystem. When the temperature dropped enough and the humidity was right, it made its own snow.
The enormous waterfall on “Langley Mountain” was made for drama with its robust flow and cascading design. It’s also a waterfall for all seasons, designed to operate in freezing weather in winter.
POST AVALON
Looking back on the opportunity that was my work for Mr. Langley, I’m ever mindful that it never could have happened without my steadfast army of collaborators.
Today we are based in Las Vegas. I do consulting work and run a precast concrete pool business with my son and daughter-in-law. Sometimes I think about the Spirit of Avalon projects that were prepped for but never implemented. Yet. A 10,000-square-foot treehouse. Artificial trees. Consulting with a Hollywood pyrotechnics expert to set fire to the entire lake.
Still, the project stands apart from any I’ve ever seen or done elsewhere. It had a client, scope and, indeed, a spirit that was all its own.
Read Part I here.
Mario Abaldo has worked in design and construction for more than 35 years. His career began at age 15 with certifications in masonry and photovoltaics. Educated at Region 8 Technical School, Southern Maine Vocational Technical School, and the University of Maine at Orono (structural engineering), Mario brings a wealth of experience to every project.
Sherry Abaldo is a writer whose work appears in The New York Times, Down East Magazine, Rattle, ONE ART, on the History Channel and PBS, and elsewhere. She holds degrees from Wellesley College and USC film school. She met Mario at age 14.