Making a Splash Is His Business : Entrepreneur’s Water Fantasies Prove Profitable
You can call him “wacko” or you can call his work bizarre--he does. But don’t, pleads self-proclaimed water swami Howard Fields, call his spewing volcanoes, spitting turtles or galloping marble horses boring.
Fields, a 39-year-old former biochemist and fruit rancher, dove into the full-time design of exotic swimming pools and ponds 2 1/2 years ago. He has come up a million-dollar-a-year winner.
“We’re doing some monster water extravaganzas,” he said proudly in a recent interview, explaining the function of his 14-employee Sausalito, Calif., company--Howard Fields & Associates.
In other words, Fields is a leading creator of water fantasies, mostly for major hotels and resorts.
His company has headed the architecture and engineering work for about 200 projects, ranging in cost from $20,000 to several million dollars. They run the gamut from city fountains to a six-block-long “river” and a lake featuring 100-foot waterfalls, live fish and a glass island topped by a piano.
The Venice, Calif.-born entrepreneur gathers ideas on people’s unfulfilled aquatic fantasies while traveling the world to arrange his own. A typical 10-day trip takes him to places like Bali, Venezuela, Hawaii and the East Coast. His company also has projects in Tahiti and the Caribbean.
Fields himself doesn’t even like getting wet, he confesses. A wide-ranging work background shows that he’s what he wants his employees to be--a bit of a Renaissance man.
After attending graduate schools of medicine at UCLA, Southern California and the University of California-Berkeley, he bought a Sonoma County ranch featuring prunes, apples, cherries, pigs and sheep.
More Jobs Followed
Needing a more lucrative venture, he founded Fields Construction Co. and began building restaurants and homes. A request from a small town for a municipal swimming pool led to similar jobs in other cities in California and Nevada.
By 1981, Fields felt burdened by a staff that had grown to 50 employees, and he bought a sailboat to travel around the world. But at one of his last planned jobs, a large hotel pool, a Hyatt executive liked his work so much that he “sent me off to look at a problem, and that was the beginning.”
Howard Fields & Associates, founded in late 1984, has done water projects for 40 Hyatts, numerous other hotels, IBM, ski resorts, the McDonald’s chain, and millionaires in California, Hawaii and Texas.
In construction at a hotel on Maui is a pool project containing locks that “flush” swimmers out at a higher level than where they entered, Japanese and Hawaiian gardens, and a “wild” pool that Fields describes as “kind of a cross between Hearst Castle and the Taj Mahal.”
But his favorite project, at a Puerto Rican resort, is a $3.5 million, six-block-long pool he says is the world’s longest. The project took less than nine months from conception to completion, he says.
“It used to be that a person would have to go to Africa, South America or maybe the Colorado River to have a river experience or see an unusual water feature,” he said.
“We’ve tried to create artistic ambience and fun at areas where major airlines land, and at the same time making it so it’s not an artistic nightmare for the owner.”
