High-Tech Pools and Cloonan Design Garner Masters of Design Distinction

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Nothing can replace the power of collaboration, especially when it spans decades. See this project as concrete proof.

High-Tech Pools of North Olmstead, Ohio, has been partnering with Cloonan Design Services of Willoughby, Ohio for 32 years. Here, they joined forces on a riverside property with a home and casita designed by George Clemens Architecture of Chagrin Falls, Ohio.

While the home and casita face different directions, Clemens oriented the two structures to radiate off the same center point. Combined, they form a perfect arc. In designing the backyard, Pat Cloonan continued the thought.

It didn’t start like that, explains the founder and a landscape architect with the company that bears his name.

“When I first became involved, there was a rectangular pool just like every other pool,” he recalls. “I said, ‘No, that’s not going to work.’ The inspiration for the pool and backyard was the architect — I really wanted to play off the different radial patterns.”

Just as the home is designed in a layered approach with multiple roofs, this outdoor living space uses elevation change, with borders radiating from that same center point as the casita.

Front to Back
The pool has different usage zones. Nearest the casita and to one side sits the children’s play pool, with a climbing wall and a slide that wraps around from behind. Its orientation, along with the tan materials, make the slide as inconspicuous as possible, so it doesn’t intrude on the design.

The fan-shaped vanishing-edge main pool, placed directly in front of the casita, provides more of a draw for adults. Near the overhang, people can sit on one of the swim-up stools and chat with those finding shelter there. A deck finished in wood-like porcelain tile accommodates furniture for dry lounging, while a shallow, 6-inch wading pool enables wet lounging to the side. Sweeping from one side to the other — from the wood deck to the center pool to the tanning ledge — they combine to form an arc similar to that found on the roof of the home.

Throughout this backyard, elements such as the planter and stepping pads are plotted to continue the movement of lines radiating from the center point. But the stepping pads didn’t just reinforce that rhythm, Cloonan says. “[They] allow you to have a really dramatic experience, like pulling you out of the casita into the fire pit area,” he says. “It feels almost like you’re able to walk across the water.”

View from here
The scene was made all the more dramatic by the 36-foot-long, see-through acrylic vanishing-edge wall. Besides adding to the sleek, modern look of the space, the team at High-Tech suggested a clear wall to preserve as much of the view as possible of the Chagrin River, 125 feet below.

“If you’re standing in the casita, you’re looking at the long portion of a Z bend in the river out in the distance,” says Jerry Hammerschmidt, operations manager and co-owner with High-Tech Pools. “If there was no acrylic panel, you’d be able to [visually] connect the water at the weir in the distance to the river, but … you omit the long portion of the Z in the view.”

Laminar arcs shoot from behind the vanishing edge and into the pool, making for a fun feature. “The laminars create like a tunnel,” Cloonan says. “You can walk through them, which creates an amazing space and ambient feel.”

Color-changing lights on the laminar jets and vertical sprays in the wading pool add another sensory layer.

“Every step you take, you’re walking toward a destination, and … every different angle is creating a completely different experience,” Cloonan says.

At night, the spa with fire-and-water feature takes the spotlight. Though perhaps not obvious to the naked eye, the spa isn’t a perfect rectangle. Conforming with the same plot of radiated lines, it has a fan shape like the other main elements, with the back wall slightly wider than the front portion.

High-Tech pulled off an effect rarely seen in backyards, physically combining the fire and water. The team did this by submerging the fire ring under water and introducing gas bubbles under the surface, and installing an igniter just above it. As the gas bubbles float up to the surface, they are lit by the igniter to create the fire.

To provide proper setbacks for the fire ring and install the glass mosaic tile around the slight curves with fewer cuts than you could count on both hands, the team needed to show extreme precision.
“We were down to about 1/16-inch in terms of tolerance,” says High-Tech president/co-owner Jeff Hammerschmidt.

The spa includes what the collaborating firms have come to call a “king seat.” Developed on their mutual projects over the years, these custom seats are sculpted based on the clients’ measurements and include jets behind the back and calves and under the feet.

“The evolution of the king seat was 25 years or so ago,” Jeff Hammerschmidt explains. “We started doing that for Pat Cloonan, when he said, ‘I was at a [resort] where they had calf jets, why don’t we put those in the seat?’ Then our construction manager said, ‘I was in Mexico and they had jets right on the soles of your feet,’ so the king seat developed even further. So it was really an evolution, and now we’re putting them in all over the place.”

To preserve the acrylic panel and fire feature through winter, the pool and spa are both designed to run year-round with the water at 65 degrees Fahrenheit year round to make sure the acrylic doesn’t get below its lowest tolerance point.

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SUPPLIERS:

• Pump/filter/heater/chemical feeder/ waterfeatures: Pentair
• Controller: Poolside Tech
• Tile: Noble Tile, Artistry in Mosaics
• Coping/deck finishes: Valdeer Stone
• interior finish: Pebble Technology
• Fire feature: Fire by Design
• Automatic cleaner/drain
• covers/fittings/skimmers: A&A
• lights: PAL Lighting
• Jets/swim currents/spa
• components: Waterway
• Autofill: Zodiac
• Handrails/slides/diving boards: Dolphin Waterslides
• Other: OceanEars Underwater
• Speakers; ASI Acrylic Pool Wall;
• Aquaclimb Climbing Wall