Bubbling in the Shade

Bubbling in the Shade

When I bought this house on the hilltop it was January of 2012. I saw it on Christmas morning, 2011 from astride my motorcycle (only from the bottom of the driveway since I was sheepish of interrupting the seller’s holiday), went to contract on December 28th, finally had my sister the architect do a walk-through with a phone video camera and closed on the sale on January 30th, my 58th birthday. I was recently reviewing the email flow from that quick month and see that besides the inspection report, which detailed a goodly number of nits and nats that needed attention (most or all of which I have dealt with, and then some), there was an email exchange with a guy referred to me by my sister and who specialized in building top quality in-ground spas. He was preparing a proposal for installing a spa on the hilltop adjacent to the patio. At the time I recall the sellers chuckling that they had removed a spa from the patio and installed a barbecue area instead. My new spa was to be in a different and (in my opinion) much better location and of a much higher aesthetic and functional quality. A top-notch spa was a must for a California home to me, even though I was prepared to forego a pool as an extravagance that would see far less use than a spa…especially a great spa like I was planning.

When I got the proposal, I had two reactions. The first was that it had been beautifully designed with a gunite ten foot square tub tiled into an infinity pool coping with iridescent southwestern-colored tiles. It was set down between the two opposing boulders with the surrounding trench tiled with blonde flagstone. It was four feet or so below the patio level, so there were large stepping stones along the top boulder cascading down the small hill and surrounded by a waterfall effect with a babbling brook falling over black river stones. Those stones continued down into a moat that surrounded the spa and then headed off from the far side down the hill towards the driveway entrance. The beauty of the design, however, was offset by a price tag more like what I would have expected for a pool rather than a spa. I told the designer that I was not prepared to pay 15X what an inexpensive spa would cost. He asked what I would be willing to afford and I gave him a number of 10X, which was more than I expected to spend, but low enough to make the sting tolerable. He agreed and said he would have to make a few cuts to the plan.

Off he went and off I went back to NYC only to return once the spa was completed. And here’s the thing, with the exception of the continuation of the moat down below the spa, everything else was as described in his initial 15X proposal. When I asked how he could have given me a 14X spa for 10X and his response was that he felt the design integrity needed to be maintained and he made it work within my budget. There are two ways to take this news. Perhaps the spa guy was just jamming me in the first place and building in massive margins, or maybe he was just a guy who ultimately cared more about aesthetics than profit and just shaved one feature off and made the rest work perhaps without profit. While I have no way to know since I don’t know spa costing well enough and I wasn’t even here to see how the building took place, I want to think I got a 14X spa for 10X. It certainly feels like a 14X spa to me.

When my son Thomas was in town and we were soaking in the spa he asked me if the hot tub was my favorite enhancement I had made to the hilltop property. While I hadn’t thought of it that way, I found myself thinking that he had nailed it. Gardens and games areas, plantings and bonsai are all great and occasionally enjoyable, but nothing on this hilltop gets as much use and gives me as much pleasure as a soak every other day or so in my own private resort amongst the boulders. On an absolute basis, I would have to say that the spa and its setting are the most unusual and inspiring feature of the hilltop. With the award-winning cactus garden, the vast array of specimen plantings, the creative games area and the massive downhill boulder sculptures, that is actually saying quite a lot.

Since I like to use my spa on an all-season basis, I vary the water temperature from 90-92 degrees with an occasional spike to 95. In this way it is warm enough to sooth and cool enough relative to body temperature to be refreshing at the margin. I tend to stay in for up to an hour and at that temperature range, it presents no problem. But then there is the sun. When I used to go in in the morning (my initial preference until I saw the propane bills rolling in) the downhill boulder would do a good job of shading me from the sun. Now that I go in between 3pm and 6pm, the afternoon Spring and Summer sun scorches the spa surface and there is no shaded spot. The solution was obvious, so last year I bough an articulated sun umbrella which I placed on the East side of the spa (the only place with an adequately large flat surface for the stand). Eventually, as I shifted to an afternoon spa schedule, I had to move the umbrella to the Western side of the spa, so I had Handy Brad lay down a set of concrete pillars to hold the broad umbrella base and then bolt them into the rebar-set pillars.

Now the articulated umbrella extends out over the the center of the spa and throws most of the spa into a lovely shade for the afternoon. There are very few sights I find more enticing on a sunny hilltop afternoon than this idyllic spa bubbling away in a shady spot between the boulders. The local bird population seems to agree with me because while I soak and spend my time writing stories on my makeshift spa-side desk (yes, I have desk on which to write my stories in ten different places around the house and grounds at any given time), the birds partake of the artificial babbling brook and prance and splash around like children, bathing in their way at the same time of day I now bathe.

I am a big believer of counting my blessings each and every day. They say that doing that before bedtime is the healthiest path for finding true happiness. It is strange that for millennia, man has chosen to say his prayers (another form of counting one’s blessings) before bedding down for the night. He seems to intuitively understand the importance of giving thanks for the wonders of life. Well, a sunny afternoon is not bedtime (nap time maybe) but the effect is just the same. I sit in my bubbling 14X cauldron, surrounded by lovely succulent plantings and outsized boulders and watch the world on the hilltop (birds and bees and all manner of thoughts) wander past me either literally or figuratively, as I sit calmly in the shade and remind myself that life is good , even on the worst of days.