A winner for this year’s Million Dollar Pool Design Challenge has been named.
Brad Holley
Each year, professional and student designers enter their drawings and plans for a residential waterscape to suit a fictional family. The location and family circumstances change with every iteration.
The goal of the contest is to see what designers can do when they’re not tethered by budget.
Brad HolleyPure Design
Judges and organizers whittle the applicants down to five finalists. Video presentations of the final five are shown each year at the Pool | Spa | Patio/Deck Expo at a special session, where attendees vote for the overall winner.
This year, Brad Holley, design director of Pure Design in Plano, Texas was voted grand prize winner. Holley came from the multi-family construction industry and has been a pool designer for about a decade now, having spent much of that time under the tutelage of the renowned local designer Randy Angell.
With sponsorship from Riverflow Current Systems, he earned a $10,000 prize. All finalists receive a free pass and lodging to attend the PSP/Deck Expo, as well as some financial support for airfare and incidentals, so they can present their concepts. The winner then joins the judging panel for the next year’s contest.
Take a look at this year’s challenge and Holley’s award-winning design.
Waterfront Scenario
This year’s contestants were asked to design a pool for a pair of empty nesters building their forever home on the Intracoastal waterways in the Miami Beach area. With three young-adult children, this couple hopes to entertain up to 30 people and host its family as it continues to grow.
Guests would included some of the biggest names in Miami, so the space needed to impress, while providing a warm place for grandchildren and family gatherings.
The backyard also needed to include several pieces of Latin art, which the couple collects, as well as to show overall Latin flair.
The couple also wanted to showcase the view of the Intracoastal, while providing more secluded areas that can’t be viewed by passing watercraft. Designers were required to incorporate a mass of features, including a lazy river, glass tile mural, acrylic glass element, fire and water features, sunken firepit, swim-up bar, splash pad, tanning shelf, dramatic front entry and a dramatic fountain for the driveway.
The Winning Solution
With so much to accomplish on one residential property, Brad Holley first focused on developing a concept that would anchor the entire design. For inspiration, he focused on a key element of the lifestyle on the Intracoastal — yachts.
“One particular detail that many modern boats share is a feature called a ‘hardtop,’” he explained in his presentation materials. “It’s basically the upper-most shade cover of a boat, and it’s a signature of luxurious boat manufacturers to design a pair of sharply rear-swept support columns underneath it. The more you can make it look like the columns shouldn’t be able to support the hardtop, the sexier it is.”
He decided to design a shade structure modeled after a yacht hardtop. This would provide the centerpiece for the backyard, as well as serve a number of practical purposes. It would have two levels, with the upper deck providing a spectacular view with seating and the putting green the clients requested. It would also act as a feature-packed island for the lazy river to wrap around. Such elements as the sunken fire pit, fire/water feature, tile mosaic and UltraVision multi-panel display would be placed here.
Holley put the main pool next to the structure, with an acrylic spa across from it, set on the centerline of the hardtop structure. The pool floor features a tile mosaic of Frida Kahlo, as just one of several works of Latin-inspired art. Another such piece could be found at the splash pad, which featured a South-American two-headed serpent sculpture.
The biggest challenge
The most challenging aspect of this project, not only for Holley, was fitting so many features into the space.
It would be easy for a space to become overly crowded and chaotic in this case. “It would be one thing to just cram all these features somewhere but to maintain order and flow, that was the difficult part.”
To avoid this, Holley tried two strategies.
First, he made sure to design a strong sense of flow. “I felt like, in order for it to maintain a sense of purposeful design, I wanted to ensure that there was still a good traffic flow, that you could still get from one place to another without a lot of difficulty. I felt as though if I could just maintain some sense of smooth traffic patterns, then … it wouldn’t feel too hodge-podge or like I was just throwing stuff at the wall.”
Then he made sure to design distinct spaces and used a strategy to make sure they felt isolated. Each space has a clear visual boundary. It doesn’t have to be a wall or solid structure – even something more open-air such as a pergola, columns or even furniture can have the intended effect. “It feels like an enclosed room, almost with invisible walls,” Holley says.
The finalists
Here is the full list of finalists and their prizes:
Second Place: Sam Abbara, Construction Plans Supervisor, Regal Pools, Tomball, Texas, $3,000
Third Place: Whitney Morris, Lead Designer; Stephanie Carnahan, Landscape Designer, Old North State Landscaping, Durham, N.C., $1,250
Fourth Place: Kylee Polaski, Senior Designer; Paola Hidalgo, Designer; Travis Cisneros, Design Director; Sameepa Modi, Senior Designer, AquaTerra Outdoors, Carrollton, Texas, $750
Fifth Place: Megan Trevino, Operations Manager/Project Designer; Ohana Pools, Urbana, Ill., $500.
