Tips for Exterior Design

In the backyard, you can appreciate the kind of monumentality of the concrete and where it was so important to bring in some color here with the yellow stucco and then over here with the sort of purplish stucco, and having those two textures meet in the corner, if you will. The NanaWall doors all pull back so it reveals that this entire opening is one big cantilever here, and it really provides that California indoor/outdoor feel merging with the pool. The concrete floors come in and then they just go straight in there.

Concrete pool transformationWhat we did is salvage this pool, which was the original pool shape, kind of typical 60s-70s style oblong-shaped pool with the typical concrete coping around the edge and some rocklike texture in the concrete. By kind of reclaiming the pool, we saved a lot of money and we just redid the surface around the pool so that by changing the shape, putting in a little spa in the corner, really readjusting the landscape, it really transformed this to a whole new look from what was originally a rather mundane looking backyard pool.

Exterior wallsHere we have a really good example of how lifting in stages up the walls, I was able to add some little nuances, and up there you see is a little bit of blue streak. I put it on the north side because blue typically, under intense ultraviolet light, will fade so here it's on the north side. It's not going to fade, and you can see it very clearly on the surface.

For that intervention, if you will, what I did was when they were filling up the wall, I had them stop and then I put in a slurry. I mixed up a 5-gallon bucket of concrete plus a lot of blue pigment until it was a pretty dry mix, and then I shoved it down in between the insulation and the outermost part of the form. Then they continued pouring on top of that and it left this blue streak in the way.

I was able to almost model the walls, if you will, and in a very painterly way, use pigments themselves, raw iron oxides and metallic oxides, and put them in the walls and play with it almost as if you would play with a clay-fired disc and put fired pigments on them. And, in that way, this house transformed itself from the ordinary to the extraordinary.

From countertops to floors, fireplaces, walls, you can see that anything is possible with concrete. You can start small and dream big.