Every year, the Million Dollar Pool Design Challenge offers a chance for designers to dream big — and for attendees of the International Pool | Spa | Patio/Deck Expo to choose a favorite.
Designers Mike Farley and Reid Schindler organize and host the competition, where professional and student designers alike render a project envisioned to meet very specific architectural requirements and include a lengthy list of features that merge the interests and tastes of the client couple.
Judges narrow down the entries to five finalists, all of whom attended a special session at the PSP/Deck Expo. There, attendees view video presentations by each contestant, then vote for a winner, who receives the grand prize of $10,000.
This time around, entrants had to tailor their masterpieces to reconcile the wife’s preference for Palm Springs Mid Century Modern architecture with the husband’s bent toward Rocky Mountain rustic. Among required features were a recreational pool for the home; private spool, cold plunge and sauna off the master suite; spa for 10 to 12; swim-up bar; current for exercise; fire pit and specialty fire feature.
This year’s grand-prize-winning entry, by pool and spa design veteran Kirk Bianchi, accomplished the feat of packing that considerable list of features into an outdoor design that blends harmoniously into its architecture.
Learning the language
For the owner of Phoenix-based Bianchi Design, this client profile and property perfectly matched his design style. And the competition itself served as a nostalgic exercise, since he took part in similar competitions in high school.
On a project such as this, with so many square feet and amenities requests, it can prove challenging to avoid a design that’s too busy or crowded. To guide Bianchi in avoiding that problem, he relied on guidance he received in his high-school competition days.
“I had a mentor in arch
itecture in high school,” Bianchi says. “He beat the drum that you can’t just draw something because you think it’s cool. You need an overarching theme or concept that has merit and gravity – and then every decision you make henceforth comes back to that guiding principle, from your intention.”
Today, he not only employs that principle to his own design, but shares it with attendees of his Genesis courses and students at his own design school focused on high-end exterior design.
In designing this backyard, he drew off the vocabulary he saw displayed in the home architecture.
The clean, long lines and use of glass and steel reflected influences from architects Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright. A post-and-beam glass house seeming to levitate off the ground recalled residential Japanese architecture.
“This house had a clear mathematical language to it,” Bianchi says. “Why reinvent the wheel? I would extrapolate and draw lines from the house.”
To integrate a Rocky Mountain rustic aesthetic, Bianchi carefully chose stone materials that fell within the genre and concentrated them on perimeter walls to provide the right proportion and relationship with the extensive glass used on the buildings.
“[Rock Mountain rustic] is heavy and grounded — it’s of the earth,” he explains. “Stone is heavy, glass is light and airy. The stone belongs on the ground as the more rugged foundation, then the glass house kind of floats above it.”
That care and discipline made it possible to merge a seeming laundry list of elements into a space where everything feels of a piece. “The temptation is to bring in too many divergent features that don’t harmonize with the theme,” Bianchi says. “That’s something I have to guard against with every project and every client.”
Other finalists/winners included:
Second place
Carly McCoy
Backyard Oasis
Mesa, Ariz.
$3,000
Third place
Brent Dutton
Pool Haus
Newport Beach, Calif.
$1,250
Fourth place
Anibal Lopez
Worthey Aquatics
San Antonio, Texas
$750
Fifth place
Greg Farley
Edgerock Landscape Design
Lehi, Utah
$500
