Participating in this sort of creative give-and-take is a powerful, heady brew for contractor and designer alike, and it takes time to develop the comfort level and trust needed to keep things moving forward. We've reached that level with Pedersen and have found that one project leads naturally to another - as was the case with another collaboration with him, this one in a nearby upscale neighborhood known as Newport Coast.
   Both the Back Bay and newport Coast lots offer phenomenal views of the Pacific Ocean and surrounding hillsides, but the similarities basically end there. Where the Back bay project was on level land, the Newport Coast parcel was a corner lot with elevations that dropped off dramatically from about the midpoint of the yard.

Multiple Layers

   The Newport Coast homeowners had few basic demands, but even their simple requests tended to ratchet up the difficulty of the project by several turns at once.
   Take the specimen palm tree in the middle of the yard: It wasn't to be touched, which severely limited available options for pool placement. They also wanted the pool to take up as little of the yard as possible - but it had to be big enough for the children to have a good time swimming. And they wanted a grass area, a barbecue, a bar - and maintenance of he unobstructed view, of course.
   Although this parcel has a bigger yard than the Back Bay lot, the space is still small when you consider that half of it is consumed by unusable slope.
The obvious starting place in designing for a sloping lot with an ocean view is a vanishing edge, but given the slope, accommodating the trough would have pushed the pool too far back into the yard to make the clients happy.
   

One of the extra elements that expanded the equipment space was this set of "spitters" - little jets of water that emerge from the small planters that run between the glass wall and the pool. These jets operate independent of the other systems - and so needed a pump of their own.