While there are many good public venues that are safe and entertaining for children to enjoy, there are also many dangers out there. One way to give children an exciting play environment in the safety of their own back yard is through a waterfall design by Exterior Worlds. Creating an environment like this that is easy to supervise offers children hours of carefree fun, and it provides tremendous relief for
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Water Fountains
The Murmur of Water
Outdoor water fountains can transform you and your environment
The mesmerizing sound. The transparent movement. The cool, fresh sensation. Outdoor water feature are a treat for the senses—auditory, visual and tactile. For millennia, we had placed moving water around our homes because water works some kind of magic on us, soothing us to our very essence.
Outdoor fountains make a graceful statement about a home by creating a pleasing and welcoming ambiance. They can be used to enhance the architectural style of a house. Outdoor fountains are especially beneficial in these technological times, serving as camouflage for traffic noise, humming air-conditioning units and thrashing lawn mowers. They can be designed to be played in, thus providing cool relief on a hot day—perfect for Houston.
Types of Outdoor Water Fountains
Outdoor fountains come in a multitude of shapes, sizes and styles. They can invoke Roman classicism, a Hill Country natural pool, modern garden or a Charleston garden. Fountains can be placed in a quiet corner of the yard or serve as the centerpiece along a curving front drive. Additional features can be added, such as a cascading waterfall or a contemporary wall fountain.
Whatever style you prefer, the main thing to remember is that your overall landscape will be improved if you use a water feature that coordinates with your home and garden.
Water Features Made to Order While custom-built outdoor water feature sare more expensive than prefabricated ones, they do have specific and long-lasting benefits:
- Custom-built outdoor fountains can be constructed to a much larger scale than prefabricated ones. This feature can be important when working with the scale of homes and buildings.
- One of the most common problems of ready-mades is “over-spray” or water coming out of the fountain. This malfunction leads to many problems, such as the fountain running out of water, the area near the fountain becoming slippery or moldy, and discoloration of the surrounding material due to chlorination. A custom-built outdoor water fountain addresses these problems upfront.
- A great aspect of custom-built fountains is that they can be constructed with special features: overflow release valves to drain excess water, skimmers, auto-fill lines to maintain the water level, lights, filters, auto-chlorinators and backwash lines for easy cleaning. Almost none of these enhancements are available on prefabricated fountains.
Hard Choices when it comes to Water Fountains
Choosing the right outdoor water fountain begins by looking for materials that work in our climate. These materials need to handle Houston’s intense sunlight, rain and other natural elements. Many outdoor water feature are constructed with masonry products such as brick, sandstone, limestone, concrete blocks and ledgestone. Other popular choices include rock, natural stone, tile, marble and polished stone. The basins that act as a reservoir are typically made with gunite and rebar, and then plastered—much like a swimming pool. These interior surfaces are sometimes tiled or clad with stone, pebbles or mosaics.
Fountain Design Talk
“Building a custom outdoor water fountain appears to be like building a swimming pool, but is actually far more difficult. Typically, each fountain is different and therefore each is an original. It is more like building a working piece of art,” explains Jeff Halper with Exterior Worlds. “It takes a lot of practical, real-world experience and knowledge to avoid common pitfalls when designing or constructing one.”
There is no one way to design or build a fountain, and many different approaches can achieve the same result. During the design process, the scope of the work is defined and a budget will be developed. Cost factors include material choices, decisions about illumination and long-term maintenance. The best professionals work with their clients to provide as much information as possible to make the outdoor water fountain a success.
Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is hardly a waste of time. —Sir John Lubbock
Call Exterior Worlds at 713-827-2255 with questions about adding a fountain to your landscape.
For more the 20 years Exterior Worlds has specialized in servicing many of Houston’s fine neighborhoods.
Pond Fountains
Pond fountains add vertical impact, form, and color to natural ponds and garden ponds. For homeowners who are interested in eco-friendly landscape design, they also help sustain oxygen levels within the water that support fish and other aquatic organisms. A fountain can be built anywhere within a pond, and it can be customized to behave in some very remarkable ways.
Pond fountains are the best way to keep the water
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Natural Waterfall Design
Natural waterfall design requires more deliberate planning than the average person assumes. Many individuals are surprised to learn that creating a pile of rocks is the very worst way to build a waterfall that is true to natural form. The reason for this is that nature is not as haphazard as we might assume. It follows its own laws, but there are laws it follows.
In a natural setting, what
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Modern fountain designers in Houston
Modern fountain designers often take elements from previous styles of design and reduce them to their most fundamental components. This is practice is known as minimalism and it is a core values of all things contemporary and modern.
Reducing forms to their basic geometric elements enables designers to arrange these shapes into new combinations to create specific moods for backyards, entry gardens, private outdoor art collections, and contemporary gardens.
Modern
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Contemporary Water Fountains
In general, contemporary design means spare and simple geometries arranged in a pleasing, functional way. Combining innovation and flair, these designs use dramatic shapes to create a point of view that is fluid and natural. We believe these adjectives describe contemporary water fountains, too.
With contemporary water fountain and garden design, the focus tends to be on scale rather than the axial relationships commonly found in classic landscape designs. In
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Contemporary Garden Fountain
By definition, a contemporary water fountain is a custom-designed water feature that is distinguished by very stark geometry, superior construction materials, and technological sophistication. Contemporary garden fountains are tranquil and discrete; operating on remote, silent pumps that circulate water silently so that all you hear is the water itself.
One thing it will definitely do for you is drown out the sounds of the city with the peaceful sounds of
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Custom Fountain Design
Custom fountains are meant to fulfill a special role landscaping design. They are built in accordance with a landscaping plan that sets the tone and theme of the entire property, and they play a major role in contributing to the overall look and feel of garden design. Each and every fountain must ultimately stand alone as an individual work of art that extends its aesthetic into its surroundings to the
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Pond Design
Pond design is an important element of both commercial and residential landscape architecture. A pond is a water feature that can be constructed in almost any style. It can create its own theme within the landscape, or it can be used as a subtheme within a larger, more comprehensive landscape design. A great many ponds are intentionally constructed to look like the ones we find in forests and mountains. Others
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Large water fountains
Large water fountains attract accolades and attention. You could even say that they demand attention. In the right setting, they create the right feel—both specific and universal. For serious homeowners, large water fountains are emotional eye-catchers in your landscape design, a circumstance created by the playful movement of water, the pleasing auditory effect and a certified timeless beauty.
By our definition, a large water fountain is one that ranges
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Pool Water Fountains
If you are considering adding a custom swimming pool to your landscaping design, you might want to think about the addition of a pool water fountain. We have seen pool water fountains turn an everyday swimming pool into a memorable work of art because they add movement, sound, shape and color to the landscape design. We get a great deal of pleasure from custom-designing these vehicles of enchanting, vibrant form.
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