Sunday, May 04, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

SWIMMING IN STYLE: Making a Splash

Fantasy pools feature everything from creative shapes to over-the-top effects

This pool, above and below, at the home of Mike Specter, owner of Sundance Pools, features "a little bit of everything," Specter says, including swim-up tanning decks, foggers, a cave and a grotto. Photos by John Gurzinski. Russ Watters, president of Watters Aquatech Pools & Spas, has a rim-flow pool, which appears as a vanishing edge. Photo by Gary Thompson. This pool by Aquascape Pool and Spa, above and below, has a multilevel plan with vanishing edge, hidden spa and a bridge between the pool and spa. Photos by Craig L. Moran. This Aquascape Pool and Spa project, above, features a grottolike, sunken barbecue area, below, with a swim-up bar, veiled by a waterfall. Photos by John Gurzinski.

Sam Palmer has designed some unusual pools, but the crayon-shaped one is near the top of the list.

The customer wanted a perfectly proportioned crayon shape. But not just any crayon -- specifically, a Crayola. And she wanted the entire bottom of the pool to resemble a Crayola.

"A Crayola executive flies over Las Vegas, we're in real trouble," Palmer, a designer for Sundance Pools, said with a laugh.

The Crayola design falls into the realm of fantasy pools -- pools out of reach to the average person, unless you're taking your averages from a collection of Megabucks winners. And they're increasingly popular in Las Vegas.

"You're going to find a whole mess of fantasy pools," Palmer said.

OK, but first, the Crayola pool. Why Crayola?

"It's a bit of a childhood fantasy," Palmer said.

"They often come to us when they have an idea that they need to somehow conceptualize," he added. "We step in and try to make real what they've got in some inchoate fashion in the back of their mind."

Some themes for fantasy pools are nearly standard.

"Everybody's done a piano somewhere," Palmer noted.

He can remember designing "a tremendous jukebox, which was great fun."

And, Palmer pointed out, "that kind of stuff is fun. We're a very fine, custom, high-end company known for elegance and grace. It's wonderful when they give me the opportunity to go vulgar. It allows me as a designer to just go silly and really have fun with it."

Julio Schembari, co-owner of Aquascape Pool and Spa, knows the feeling.

"We've done everything when it comes to building the fantasy pool," Schembari said. "I would say whatever the customer can dream up, we can only embellish that."

Perhaps the most outlandish, he said, was when a customer asked Aquascape to build a 10-foot-high mountain in the back yard. "And we built a gazebo on top of the mountain, that sits over the pool. That was pretty wild."

Other fantasy features, he said, include sunken barbecues with caves, swim-up bars, even one with a sunken cave with a swim-up bar. That one was on "Ripley's Believe It or Not," he said, as a background for a segment on a buffalo-fur bikini.

Palmer designed a project for a professional baseball player who wanted a guitar-shaped pool with stools for tuning keys, tons of fiber-optic lighting, and tile representing "notes and clefs and the whole nine yards," Palmer said. "And underwater speakers."

So you can imagine the pressure was on when Mike Specter, the owner of Sundance Pools, was ready to build his own pool.

"It was kind of a dream of mine," Specter said. "Probably a combination of a personal dream pool and something to show off for our company. It's got a little bit of everything in it -- remote systems, foggers. The whole pool has 85 to 100 fog nozzles in it; every rock has a fog nozzle, the cave, the grotto, the slide tubes."

There's fiber-optic lighting inside all of the tubes and cave and grotto. A 15-foot-long tube 9 feet underwater connects the pool and the cave. There are swim-up tanning decks, a 35-foot stream, a 16-foot-tall waterfall. And a replica of a saber-toothed tiger skull embedded in the wall of the cave and illuminated with a fiber-optic spotlight.

"And pirate's chests and skulls in the cave," he said. "It's just fun."

For the kids?

No kids.

"That's what people always say -- `Did you do this for your kids?' " Specter said. "We just tell people we're a couple of big kids." And they entertain a lot.

The pool would cost $250,000 on a retail basis. Specter said most fantasy pools run less than that, though one was $275,000

He has been asked, for example, "How much can you do for $150,000?"

"We have bid a couple in the $500,000 to $800,000 range, but it scared the owners -- into reality, I think," Specter said.

How much could you get for that much money?

Said Specter: "The $675,000 one would have had a lazy river. That was a very expensive ordeal. Caves, grottoes, kids' pool that was a large lagoon pool. A play area. It just became an amusement park."

He also bid a pool in the $700,000 to $800,000 range, which Specter said would have been "as large as, I would say, a small lake. Rope bridges, underground caves, boilers, all kinds of crazy things. It was a very large commercial water park in somebody's back yard."

"We have to keep the client sometimes contained. ... You don't do oversized initials in the bottom of the pool," Palmer said, because that would have a chilling effect on resale if the buyer's initials were different.

"You'd be surprised how often ego enters into it," he added.

And sentiment.

"Someone asked for a pool in the shape of Nevada, which did not lend itself to a decent swimming pool," Palmer said.

"We've done quite a few in the upper $100,000s," Specter said. "Most people start looking at the investment after that. Most people will say between 10 (percent) and 15 percent is what you want to spend, in relation to the home. So for a $300,000 home, $30,000 to $40,000 is a wise investment."

Of the elaborate projects, he said, "that's the fun part, creating something groundbreaking. It's a lot of hard work, but the creative side allows you to enjoy it."

Sometimes the money is not just in the aesthetics, but in the technical requirements mandated by the aesthetics.

"We've done a couple of what they call rim-flow pools," said Russ Watters, president of Watters Aquatech Pools & Spas. "It's like a vanishing edge, but the whole pool does that. The water is the same elevation as the deck that comes up to it.

"They're very expensive to build; there's a lot of hydraulics involved in them. They're way cool."

Which didn't impress his subcontractors.

"The subs said, `If you never build another one, it's too soon,' " Watters said with a laugh.

But the cool factor isn't all that drives the fantasy-pool market.

"I think when people build fantasy pools, they're building their lifestyles," Schembari said. "They're building their own backyard vacation. They want to get away from the daily routine of life, and the stresses. They want to turn on the music and the water features and be lost in another world.

"And they have something they can be proud of for years."