The Art of Engineering The Art of Engineering

Since 1980, Aquamatic pool covers have focused on safety, energy savings and ease of use. With our technology, we are setting a higher standard through innovation and design. Supported by a 20 year mechanical warranty, and the most standard features of any automatic cover in the industry.

Hydramatic

•all-fluid hydraulic drive

•one-fourth the moving parts

•zero lubrication & self-adjusting

HydraLux

•unique trackless design can cover virtually any pool

•the only energy saving insulated automatic cover

•manufactured exclusively in the USA

PM: You’ve been called one of the best designers in the industry and you’re a mentor to maybe hundreds, if not thousands of builders.

PB: I like to pride myself on my accessibility. People call me all the time, and say ‘I took your construction class and I’ve got a question about something’. So I’m more than happy to mentor people. In a couple of weeks, I’m going back to North Carolina to mentor a guy who’s doing his first knife edge pool.

I kind of fell into a very modern, clean, and contemporary style, which I think is probably one of the most difficult architectural styles to build. My projects are usually architecturally integrated with the home. It’s usually one and the same with a free-flowing, kind of indoor-outdoor lifestyle where it’s really a seamless transition between the architecture of the inside of the home and outside living space.

PM: That’s really what high-end homeowners want.

PB: Yes, exactly. So I don’t like that if you build a house and then you did this crazy thing in the backyard. I could do those but it would just look tacked on. I’m not one of those guys who if a client wants to do a fire feature, I’m not going to go through a catalog and pick something that’s in distribution. We’re going to go have something custom-made for that job.

PM: This latest project has some incredible elements, where the backyard itself has this dramatic kind of elevation.

PB: Yeah, it has a very dramatic slope. Originally they came to me and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this hillside. We want to put a pool on it.’ So we said absolutely. We ended up building the pool on top of an extension of the foundation of the home.

PM: What we really love is how amazing this pool looks day or night.

PB: It’s really cool yeah. During the design phase, the client was really concerned about color. The only way that I can guarantee somebody that the pool is going to have a particular color is tile. We ended up choosing tile out of Canada, a fused glass from

Interstyle. What’s neat about them is they have a myriad of colors and textures. So they’ve got probably eight or ten different textures from little wavy surfaces to little bumps. They’ve got all kinds of surface variations that you can get.

PM: The lighting on this pool is incredible, too. We love the starfield kind of look and feel that you managed to achieve.

PB: Thanks. The fiberoptic starfield on that project was the first time I’ve done one in a glass tile pool. We didn’t want to have to drill holes in the glass tile, so we had to come up with a methodology of being able to align the fibers to come up between the grout joints of the tile. My tile guys were very patient. We obviously complicated things for them extra with dealing with the starfield. We had 300 little fiber optics coming out of the floor so as they were setting the sheets of tile we were pulling the fibers through the grout joint and then going back and detailing between the tiles with the thin set being careful not to damage the fiber optics.

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