A Restoration of a Classic Fountain
Water features can be extremely challenging to design and implement. One cannot make assumptions about what water will do, how it will flow and where it will end up.
Pump pressure, splash, reservoir capacity and circulation all play a big factor in how your finished water feature will turn out. Expecting water to evenly and consistently disperse just because you send it through a pump can be a fool’s errand.
In the end, however, a well-planned and executed water feature can lead to fantastic results.
In this case, bsq Landscape Architects was asked to integrate a classic fountain in a beautiful Tudor home restoration project in Toronto’s Babypoint neighbourhood. This was a 1st for us and we did not expect this to be much of a challenge. Simply assemble the fountain, run a pump and touch up the paint and it should be up and running.
Once we saw the boxes of dusty and rusty fountain basins along with many parts that seemed to have a yet unknown function we realized that this would be a lot more involved than previously anticipated.
The 1st step was to prepare the fountain for a new lifetime of service. Layers upon layers of old paint had to be removed from this century old heritage piece. We were very fortunate to have Calan from CLS Welding willing to pick and transport these pieces to a facility where they could be professionally prepped, stripped and painted. Many companies would have preferred to avoid the hassle factor with this so his effort was much appreciated.
At this facility the fountain pieces were carefully sandblasted and prepared and then an epoxy based paint was baked on at a specialty paint shop to provide maximum rust protection.
In order to feature the fountain, a new concrete basin was required. This needed to be carefully designed so that the electrical and auto-fill water feeds could be brought in without being seen, the pump could be hidden in an accessible location for adjustments and then power for the pump and the submersible lights could be provided through watertight junction boxes that would also be submerged and not seen.
A custom concrete plinth was needed to raise the fountain to an appropriate height for viewing above the basin and then proper water needed to be managed and calculated.
The original design of the fountain had the water flowing from the top down but the limitation with this approach is that each lower basin doubled in size making what was a torrent of water at the top basin become just a trickle over the sides of the much larger lower basins.
To resolve this issue and to add interest a spray ring was added in the lower basin to create additional arcs of water that would fill the lower basin and increase the volume of water in circulation and flowing over the sides. All of this required extensive plumbing which had to be mapped, calculated and reduced in great detail which Reinaldo at Classic Fountain Systems handled with the expertise one can only get from years of experience.
Once this was complete we needed to complete the stone cladding and coping on the lower basin along with interior tile and planting for a finished, classic water feature.
This was a challenging but fun experience, something completely new for us after so many contemporary water features that we have done but it was a fun and rewarding aspect of this project and it was very gratifying to see this historical feature restored to its former glory and perhaps beyond.
Many thanks to Calan at CLS Welding and Reinaldo at Classic Fountain Systems for their patience and thorough expertise. They were able demystify the process of salvaging and restoring this wonderful fountain.