What immediately catches the eye in this project are the 400 tons of fossil-bearing limestone boulders — some up to 12 feet long. Complicating matters was a 17-foot drop-off directly behind the boulderscape.
Rock opera
What immediately catches the eye in this project are the 400 tons of fossil-bearing limestone boulders — some up to 12 feet long. Complicating matters was a 17-foot drop-off directly behind the boulderscape.
“There’s not one pound of live load that we transferred onto the pool wall — otherwise the whole pool would just collapse,” Michael Giovanone says. With limited space constraints, crews spent about a month building the footing — about 10 feet wide — from the ground up.
Grotta have it
Cut into the considerable boulderscape is an integrated grotto enhanced with automated stereo speakers and bench seating for four.
But Giovanone’s crew also had to make sure it was structurally sound: “The top weir stone — the roof of the grotto — is real stone, and there’s probably 20 tons of stone resting on top of that,” he explains, “so you want to make sure your tolerances are calculated accurately.”
Meantime, it all rests on more than 50 yards of structural concrete footings some 20 feet below its peak.
Extras, extras
Incorporating a 20-foot slide into the complex boulderscape meant Goivanone had to consider safety first. So prior to even adding water to the pool, Concord’s crew sent children of varying sizes slowly down the chute, and caught them on a scaffold, to ensure it was hazard-free.
Landscaping to soften the boulderscape and surroundings provided yet another tricky element: “When you plant in stones, it becomes an oven,” Giovanone says. “It really dehydrates any plantings.” Thus, Giovanone opted for low-maintenance, yet colorful, seasonal vegetation — a lot of grasses and ivies — and created more than a dozen automatically irrigated flower pits.
