Ep 148 The Secret to High-End Naturalistic OutdoorDesigns: Fontana Ponds & Water Features

You mentioned the sound.

Water is, I tell clients all the time, is two different things.

And I have to understand when I'm creating something for somebody, is it about the sound or is it about the visual effect that you're getting? And which one do you think is more important to most of your clients?

I think it's probably, oh man, that's a hard one.

I get so many phone calls from people.

Some of them are like, no, it's

both.

I can't decide.

It really is.

I think it's hard to choose between the two.

I will say I get a lot of phone calls where people are like, we live near a busy road or we live near a small elementary school.

We want to just kind of drown out the sound.

We want a little bit of white noise just so that we can... calm things down but at the end of the day i mean everybody's going for the visual like you want to see something i mean one of the key things that i learned from brian helfridge from aquascape you can find his youtube channel at team aquascape brian is one of the best designers of entire backyards i mean the guy knows how to create an experience rather than just a visual And one of the things I learned from him is to design from inside the house.

So in a consultation, I like going inside of the house if possible to, Hey, let's get a view from inside the kitchen.

Let's get a view from the living room.

Where is this going to be seen? And then also we got to remember that at least here in our climate in January, it gets dark at like four o'clock or four 30 and it's raining.

And it's, you know, it's that Seattle type weather where it's just like, gloomy and rainy so if you're not going to be able to sit by your water feature you may as well look out your window and then the lights come on and you see the waterfalls cascading you can enjoy the sound and the visuals just by cracking a window you can enjoy the sound but you can enjoy the visual from inside the house so it's very important to design from inside the house because even the most outdoor loving people aren't going to spend all day in their backyards they're still going to be inside There's still stuff to clean.

There's dishes to do.

There's food to cook.

And there's places where you just sometimes need to sit, relax, watch TV.

Imagine you look out your left and there's a window just in a picturesque waterfall coming out of the window.

So that's definitely it goes back to both the visual and the sound.

I'm almost half tempted to say the visual is even more important.

Well, you can get the visual and not even be out in the space.

So, I mean, like you said, you can be in your kitchen or in your living room and look out your master bedroom or whatever.