Moving Water

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The slope of this property was ideally suited to the homeowner's request for water in transit over varied elevations, recalls David Klohr, Jr. from Smart Pools & Spas in Las Vegas. "The customer came to us knowing he could do something neat with that kind of slope," he says. So David Klohr, Sr. presented a 3-D rendering, and the job began.

Stepping out from the house, the property was 3 feet below grade, and dropped another 2 feet. The pool, therefore, was built up out of the ground so its surface would be level with the home's patio. "That gave us a natural trough position for the negative edge," Klohr, Jr., says.

The sound of water was important to the client, so the Klohrs added flagstone outcroppings to the face of the negative edge, which is otherwise all tile. "We can control the flow over the edge so they still have a trickling water sound even when the fountains and waterfalls are not on," Klohr, Jr., explains. "If only the edge is on, they have a soft, subtle noise."

When they want the full visual and audio effects, the owners can turn on all five water features. Moving clockwise in the photo from the negative edge, these are: a stepped waterfall flanked by fire rings, the spa's 45-degree angle spillway, the 12-inch-deep wet deck's spillover, the three bubblers in the wet deck and a small rock waterfall that is partially obscured in the photo by the flagstone bridge leading from the patio to the wet deck.

At night, the property is aglow with underwater color-changing lights, white spotlights and three fire rings, which Smart Pools & Spas creates inside man-made lava rock.

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