Big Splash : Artificial Sandstone Mesas and Fabricated Rock Grottoes Turn a Hillside Laguna Beach Pool Into a ‘Natural’ Paradise

When Liz and Volkert Bernbeck would tell friends they planned to build a swimming pool on the hillside below their Laguna Beach home, the response was predictable.

“The hill was so steep it was hard for anyone to imagine how it could be done,” Liz recalled as she negotiated a series of rock steps leading down to a sandstone grotto, her 2-year-old daughter in tow. “They’d stand on the balcony and look down and laugh.”

No one is laughing now.

To say that the Bernbecks built a swimming pool is to say that the Titanic struck an ice cube.

After six years of planning, another full year’s work by teams of skilled craftsmen and a cash outlay of about $170,000, the Bernbecks ended up with not only a pool, but an entire mountain of sandstone mesas and rock grottoes spread over an acre of hillside overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

And, except for the flora and a few scattered boulders, the whole thing is as phony as a Mafia tax return.

Mt. Bernbeck is an illusion.

Its cracked and weathered rock face is actually a shell of hand-sculpted concrete set against steel reinforcing bars and chicken wire.

Mother Nature may have been the model for this ancient sandstone outcropping, but she was not the architect. That task went to Rock and Waterscape Systems in Irvine, a company of 150 people who design and build naturalistic rock and water habitats from artificial means.

While the company has routinely performed commercial waterscaping jobs for Disneyland, hotels, zoos and theme parks around the world, only in recent years has the growing residential demand for fabrication played a significant role in its $25-million-a-year business.

This year, the company expects to perform about 25 large custom residential jobs in Orange County alone. “That’s about twice the number we did here just three or four years ago,” said Lance Friesz, Rock and Waterscape’s marketing director.

“People are just starting to find out what’s possible in creating natural-looking rock formations,” said Friesz, an 18-year veteran with the company. “As they get out and travel around the world, they see some of the fantastic commercial projects that have been done and they come home and want to do something similar for their yards and pools.”

Such was the case with the Bernbecks, who, while on a visit to Hawaii a half-dozen years ago, saw one of the company’s fabricated sandstone grottoes at their hotel.

Volkert said he thought a smaller version of the grotto would look nice in his back yard. A check with the hotel revealed the name of the builder.

Five years later, the same talents that had built hotel lagoons for Disney, Hyatt and Hilton, realistic animal enclosures for the San Diego Zoo, and show attractions such as Camp Snoopy at Knott’s Berry Farm, were set to work transforming shrub and dirt into rock mesa.

Although the Bernbecks originally intended to build a modest rock swimming pool, when work finally ended a year later, it looked like a chunk of Disneyland had fallen from the sky and landed--intact--on the hillside behind their home.

“We kept expanding the rock work and adding more water features as things went along,” Volkert explained. “It just kept growing until what you see today.”

That sight now includes a spectacular sweep of sandstone ridges, a cliff-hugging pool, two waterfalls, spa, running stream, fountain, reflecting pond, and a water slide that would give vertigo to a mountain goat.

Liz said the city of Laguna Beach needed to be persuaded that the massive complex of water and rock would stay on the hill and not end up on the Coast Highway 500 feet below.

“We needed approval (for expanding the project), of course,” she said. “The city was concerned about the stability of so much rock work.”

After checking work plans and consulting with the engineers at Rock and Waterscape, Liz said the city agreed to the project. “We were very, very surprised that it went through with such relative ease, considering the scope of the thing.”

The Bernbeck back yard is among the company’s more ambitious residential projects, according to Friesz.

“Not everyone has all the water amenities that they do,” he said. “But more and more, people with the financial means are getting bolder in their approach to outdoor fabrications.”

Brian Culbertson, sales manager for Regina’s Statuary in Costa Mesa, said the trend toward natural water settings is quickly catching on with county residents. Although currently specializing in more traditional precast fountains for the home, he said his company will soon begin developing its own molds for creating rock waterfalls and rock-lined pools.

Culbertson, who has done custom rock work for other companies in the past, said that the demand for all forms of outdoor water features, including wall and free-standing fountains, has at least doubled in the past half-dozen years.

To help meet this growing demand, companies have started to offer lines of prefabricated waterscapes. Rock and Waterscape, for example, has created an assortment of waterfalls, ponds and grottoes priced from $500 to as much as $30,000. The units come ready to install with piping and pumps for the circulation of water.

“If a (landscape)contractor or homeowner doesn’t have the money to put together a good custom display, these prefab units can be pulled off the shelf and installed in as little as 10 working days,” explained Friesz, adding that his company expects to sell close to 100 ready-made units this year for placement in private back yards throughout Orange County.

Due to the corrosive action of natural alkali in water, the concrete used in fabricated rock formations must be reinforced with alkali-resistant plastic fibers to prevent breakdown of the formation over time.

In fact, according to Friesz, the longer water runs over the artificial stone surfaces, the more natural-looking they become due to staining and the gentle abrasive action of particles found in the water.

“What happens is that you get a balloon of colors from debris that drops from the trees, from leaves that sit in the water, and from trace metals that are released from within the concrete,” he said.

A good example of this natural weathering process can be seen on the stone face of a three-waterfall grotto that the company installed six years ago in the Newport Beach back yard of Robert Mayer, who is co-owner of the new Waterfront Hilton hotel in Huntington Beach.

“The rock looks better and better as it gets older,” said Mayer, pointing out the darkening streaks of discoloration similar to those found on real water-exposed stone. “It really is hard to believe that it’s not the genuine article.”

Friesz said that to achieve realism, latex impressions are sometimes made of actual rock formations from which molds are built. “We’ve taken impressions from all over California and the western United States.”

By adding the correct tints during the coloring process, said Friesz, it is possible to duplicate any type or shape of rock.

The practice of real-life molding, however, is expensive.

To save money, most residential rock work is hand-sculpted on the spot as the concrete is applied to its foundation of steel bars and chicken wire. Although sculptors are guided in their work by an exact scale model of how the project should look, a certain degree of free-style creativity is possible--and even crucial.

“Let’s say the homeowner doesn’t quite like how something is turning out,” Friesz said. “Then he can ask to have it changed on the spot and our people can do it.”

Which is exactly what Liz and Volkert Bernbeck did during the months of stony creation that took place in their back yard.

“It was great how much input we had throughout the whole process,” Liz said. “If the shape of a rock bothered us, the artists would scrape off the concrete, bend the rebar (reinforcing bar) a different way, and do it again.”

Volkert said he even asked the artists to paint the existing rocks on his property to match the sandstone mesas being built in terraces descending the hill.

“Now we like to play a game with our guests and ask them to pick out the real rocks from the fake,” he said, laughing. “They almost never can do it.”

Sometimes, the Bernbecks admit, they are as mystified as anyone by the illusion achieved on their hillside.

“It’s incredible,” Liz said. “In a year, when all the landscaping has grown in, it will look unbelievable.”

As well as believable, she might add.