Out Goes the Pool
Even though a swimming pool sounds pretty good at this time of the year, Diana Leher clearly remembers the day when she decided that hers had to go. She was sitting in the house, looking out at the aging structure, when she thought, we are going to fill in that pool. She called Pamela Berstler who, with designer husband Alex Stevens, was in the middle of fashioning a new garden to go around the old pool. “Ahhh ... O-O-OK,” Berstler recalled, saying she was a little stunned. “We can do that.”
The reason for the mid-course change was that Leher had become pregnant after the design and landscaping work had begun. The sloping frontyard had already been planted in the first phase of construction. The narrow backyard, extremely so in some spots, was next. Since the Westside house perches on a steep hillside, like a rock climber on a thin granite ledge, there was very little level ground.
The only spot big enough for anything wider than a path, was filled with a pool. There was no place to ride a bike, no place for a play structure. In short, no place for kids. At this point in their lives, a lawn made a lot more sense than a pool.
But in the last few years, quite a few people have taken out lawns, or pieces of them, to make room for flowers, vegetables or fruit trees. Lawns use lots of water, and, in a dry state, there are more responsible, drought-resistant choices. But there is one thing lawns excel at--being a play surface for kids. In the landscape, nothing is safer, softer, or tougher.
“Where we had a nearly useless pool with no shallow end and no fence, that was dangerous, needed lots of repairs and was expensive to maintain,” said Leher, “I now have a yard.” Her 2-year-old son has a lawn to romp on and her husband, Richard, has “a place to shoot hoops.”
The Lehers were the first clients to ask Berstler and Stevens, who run the design firm Flower to the People in West Los Angeles, to fill in a pool. It’s not all that complicated to do, though it isn’t cheap, said Berstler. It cost about $18,000 to fill in the Leher pool, which was about 18 feet by 20 feet, and plant lawn on top, probably more than it cost to put in the pool in 1976.
A Place to Shoot Hoops
Where the sun deck for the pool had been is now a partial basketball court with a three-point line and a height-adjustable Goalrilla backboard system. The court is paved with a special easy-on-the-knees material called Mateflex. There’s a bright-green fescue lawn for son Marcus to run around on, at least until he’s old enough to join his dad on the court. Queen palms, giant birds of paradise, gingers and other lush, tropical-appearing plants grow next to the lawn, which is surrounded by colorful, whimsical paving so Marcus can race round and round on his tricycle.
Flower to the People has since filled in three more pools--including one in Santa Monica--though they say they don’t want to make this a career specialty. The firm has recently done several projects for HGTV’s “Landscapers’ Challenge,” and their work has been seen in several publications.
Holes for Drainage
In Los Angeles the cheapest way to convert a pool into a lawn or garden is to fill it in, leaving the old shell in place, though in certain circumstances the city may require homeowners to remove it. If the shell stays, the city requires the pool walls to be partially broken down. In the Lehers’ case, they removed about a third of the pool walls and the concrete was carted away. In addition, they drilled many foot-wide holes in the bottom of the pool for drainage, another city requirement.
The next step was to fill most of the pool with mechanically compacted gravel or other material, and finally a 3-foot layer of topsoil for the lawn. “It’s basically a huge, compacted gravel pit,” said Berstler. Even with all this compacting the lawn still settled after a winter’s worth of rain.
A filled-in pool may be landscaped but no building is allowed on top of it. Berstler said that in Los Angeles, the Department of Building and Safety first must grant a grading permit, then one must record the location of the filled-in pool with the County Recorder’s office so future owners will know where it is.
Fish Pond Made Safer
There was one other smaller body of water on the Lehers’ property, an ugly little fish pond that was also quite easy to fall into. Berstler and Stevens made this pool much smaller and raised the edge to bench height, which provided a barrier and a place to sit while watching the fish or looking at the water lilies. Just to make sure small boys don’t fall in, and to keep hungry raccoons out, a removable decorative grill is resting on brackets just above the water.
When they first started work on this pond, the designers discovered that what appeared to be a small two-tiered fountain was actually four tiers high but obscured by jungle-like vegetation. The designers and homeowners would have preferred to simply remove this imposing structure, but it was integrally connected to the retaining walls that hold back the hill, so they simply resurfaced it with green and blue tiles.
The fountain had been completely covered with brick like the retaining walls and driveway in front, and the paving around the swimming pool. Berstler and Stevens kept the brick in front but otherwise took out as much of it as they could and used other materials, including organic swirls of colored concrete and smooth tiled surfaces.
“Enough brick, already,” as Diana Leher put it.
