It was 2:14 AM on a Tuesday and I was deep in the water trying to burst the custom-built cascading wall feature that was about to flood the entire third floor of my biggest client’s Portland downtown headquarters. Hector the maintenance guy was also having his struggle holding up the main leak with a bucket as I desperately searched for the emergency shutoff valve which I swear I labeled clearly during the installation process. I did not know where all the water was coming from but I knew that the ceiling tiles pouring water were absolutely downgrading the thirty thousand dollar conference table and my phone was buzzing with utterly frantic texts from my client whos CEO was alarmed by the security services.
Not exactly how I wanted to spend the worst night of my life.
“Hector, I thought you said this thing had built in overflow protection”, he said while pouring what was his seventh bucket of water into the overflowing toilet.
“It does,” I said, drenched and trying to stifle what was at this point either sweat or tears. “Or it did. Or it was supposed to. I don’t know what happened.”
I later learned around 4 AM that after we finally managed to turn off the water supply at the main building, the fail-safe drainage system I designed had somehow filled to capacity with Portland’s notoriously hard water calcium deposits. The “backup” sensor which was supposed to cut power to the pumps once the water level reached too high had also malfunctioned due to—believe it or not—a minuscule spider constructing its web inside the supposed waterproof casing which was far less waterproof than claimed.
Nature: 1, Designer: 0.
Looking back now—three years and approximately fifty water installations later—I can almost chuckle to myself, albeit not fully. After spending two full days tackling cleanup, the client did offer to cover the replacement of the conference table. “Anyone can succeed,” she said while her office was being compiled in the shop vac. “I want to work with someone who knows how to handle catastrophic failure.” I give my thanks to Sarah and her peculiar management philosophy.
That incident changed my thinking about incorporating water features into my biophilic design practice and honestly, made me a stronger proponent of water’s ability to positively or negatively alter a person’s perception of an environment. Whether it is evaluated favorably if it is gushing through beautifully crafted sluices, or unfavorably if it is oozing into your pricey wooden flooring.
I recall that my approach to that project was primarily focused on the aesthetics. Secondary, was the impact of the sounds, in this case, water flowing, and their influence on a person’s mindset—psychological impact. I desperately needed something incredible—for my Instagram, and something people don’t see every day. Yes, people were “stopped,” but perhaps not in the way I’d envisioned.
The lessons learned after this thrill is that when it comes to biophilic design, the water’s impact is more effective when being experienced rather than being viewed. There is research, and the best part, it is not speculative, that supports the claim.
The research shared with me by OHSU’s Dr. Molina last year has been extremely captivating to say the least. It highlighted that listening to the sound of running water resulted in a 35% reduction in the participants’ cortisol levels in comparison to those who were in silence. 35 percent! Just from hearing water! This reminded me of my client Trevor, who oversees that tech incubator in the Pearl District. He installed a modest wall fountain in the main work area last summer. 3 months later, he sent me an email with the subject line “WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY EMPLOYEES?”[](https://hbr.org/2022/03/psychologists-are-studying-the-elevated-classrooms-covered-in-rippling-water-to-seek-answers-to-why-learning-and-stress.)
Turns out their team-wide productivity metrics had jumped 22% and team conflict plummeted so dramatically that they had to cancel the conflict management workshop they’d scheduled. “I’ve literally changed nothing else,” Trevor wrote. “It has to be the water feature.” (He’s since commissioned three more for different areas of their office, and no, none of them have flooded. I’ve learned my lesson about spider-proof sensor housing, thank you very much.)
The office quote: “Effective water features do much more than relieve stress or increase productivity.” In fact, it does far more than that, and it certainly allows seeing how people interact with one another in a given space. Such as, how it completely shift the social dynamics.
The project that we did in St. Johns last spring in the community center shows best how obvious this was. They had this completely wasted central courtyard which was just a sad piece of grass with two concrete benches that no one actually sat on. We changed it into a small reflecting pool with stepping stones and play fountains for kids in the summer. The budget was tiny, incredulously we did the whole thing for under $12,000 including labor.
Now? That space is always occupied by people. The director, Elena, told me that there is a schedule because various other community groups want to use it during the same time. “The seniors come in the morning for tai chi by the water. The after-school program uses it in the afternoon. There’s even been three wedding ceremonies there on weekends,” she said. “Before, it was just a place people walked through to get somewhere else. Now it’s a destination.”
What interests me is how water brings these pauses to otherwise forward moving lives. I saw this happen at the medical office after we put a simple basin fountain in the waiting area. The receptionist, Kendra, noted that people were coming in well ahead of schedule just to sit by the fountain. “People are less anxious too,” she told me. “I can tell because they’re not asking me every five minutes how much longer the wait will be.”
It puts forth an argument when we consider our evolutionary past. We are with a high chance that we had to search for water bodies in need of drinking water, and not just due to the liquid itself but also because of the safety and resources which the water sources offered for our ancestors.
“Blue Mind” is a great book which discusses the neuroscience reasoning behind calmness by Wallace “Wally” Nichols. Just being around water is said to activate a neural network associated with calmness, triggering more gentle focus rather than the alert state we find ourselves during the workday.
In my life, I have certainly seen this change. After the Great Office Flood Incident of 2022, as it shall forever be known, my office was filled with so much water I couldn’t sleep out of stress regarding potential lawsuits. Neighbors like Tara told me I could try sitting by the river since we are fortunate to have the Willamette River nearby. I thought it was ridiculous, but like all things in my world at that time, it was worth a shot.
When I finally did give it a shot, it worked, and I was amazed. One hour by the river proved to be more helpful in relaxing my mental state than a week spent panic-Googling affordable legal representation and ice cream oriented stress-eating. It’s not that my problems completely vanished—the problems were still very much there—but my relationship with them changed. I was able to think clearly which was something I hadn’t been able to do for a long time.
That experience fundamentally shifted my perception of water’s purpose in design. Now, my focus is on the water’s psychological and emotional effects before its decorative value, even though, of course, aesthetic considerations remain important — it’s not like I’m putting in ugly fountains. I design from the back to the front, or rather, from the feeling I want to elicit in the people to be in the space to the nebulous framework of the design itself.
For compact areas, such as home offices or therapy rooms, I frequently suggest discreet, tabletop fountains. Miguel, my client who works as a therapist in the Inner Southeast, informs me that he has a small Zen-like stone fountain on the side table in his office. He commented, “My clients sometimes don’t even consciously notice it’s there. But I have noticed that sessions tend to go deeper on days when I have it running versus days when I don’t.”
When there is more space available, I really like wall fountains, especially in larger commercial areas where floor space is at a premium, which is the case in most offices nowadays. They do not require valuable floor space as they offer visual and auditory benefits. Water flowing over different materials creates distinctly different experiences with the texture — over smooth glass, water provides a sheet-like flow with a gentle rushing sound, while rough stone creates associative movements resulting in a livelier, babbling brook effect.
Nothing enhances an outdoor space quite like a beautiful naturalistic pond or stream feature. These take more planning and maintenance, but the payout is enormous. For example, I just completed a project for a dental office in Beaverton where we turned what was once a drab front lawn into a stunning small pond with a recirculating stream that appears to be a natural feature. It looks like it’s always been there, we used local stone and planted native species around the edges. The dentist reports that patients often arrive early just to sit by the pond before their appointments, which has actually helped them stay on schedule because instead of running late, people are already there.
Every water feature will have its practical considerations, and believe me, after The Flood, I take these very seriously. Always a major concern, the funding directly informs how meaningful the piece will be. A quality tabletop fountain will cost a few hundred, or you can spend hundreds of thousands going Full Bellagio. The funding spent has no correlation to the impact the design will have psychologically though; I’ve witnessed $200 features transform a space more effectively than $20,000 ones.
Few people understand the significance of maintenance. Water features are not installations that one can forget about after setting them up. They absolutely require maintenance: Cleaning, examining the mechanical parts, dealing with mineral deposits, and managing algae on outdoor features. For every installation, I now create detailed maintenance instructions and require that clients specify who will be tasked with the maintenance. After witnessing a beautiful corporate lobby fountain gradually transform into a swamp monster less than six months after installation (not my design, thankfully), I’ve become zealous about teaching the importance of maintenance.
Water safety is simply another factor to take into account, especially with features in the public domain or spaces where children frequent. The depth and access points, as well as the slip resistance of surrounding materials, require all of these components need thorough consideration. For the community center project, we intentionally designed the pool to be no more than 4 inches deep so that it would encourage a textured concrete to encourage non-slip.
Also, let us not ignore the environmental concern. Conserving water has become a highly important issue in my recent work. Now, all my installations utilize recirculating systems, and I have been looking into adding mechanisms that channel rainwater into the features during the wet seasons of Portland and store it during drier months. For better or for worse, my partner’s backyard has been my testing site for these systems when things don’t go as planned. (Sorry about the mud pit incident of last spring, babe. The rain garden concept needed some refinement, if you recall.)
In my opinion, the most innovative changes in water design for biophilic spaces are for sustainable tech and wellness. At the moment I am developing a project for a local tech company where the water feature will be tied to their environmental objectives. Rainwater collected from the roof feeds into a beautiful interior feature that employees can actually see. They will observe how their building is processing and filtering the water and how they are, in effect, processing and filtering. The psychological impact is not only from the soothing sound and movement of water, but a much deeper link between the building and the inhabitants to the natural water cycle.
I’m more focused on the less overt forms of water integration features that incorporate other senses: touch, smell, taste, . . . and beyond. There are areas like controlled humidity zones where the moisture content of the air changes as you move throughout a space, or temperature gradients that are felt on the skin due to proximity to water. Some of these concepts may seem too implausible, but I believe biophilic water design will find ways to engage us in more advanced forms in the future.The project that has got my attention of late is actually a stunning fountain repair job at a retirement community in Vancouver that has been shut off for years due to maintenance problems. The residents have been fighting to get it working again because they miss the soothing sounds that come with it. Not only are we fixing the problem, but also reimagining it with reduced maintenance requirements and more interactive components that respond to nearby movement. The residents look ecstatic and hopeful. One woman, Margaret, who is 92, has been stopping me every visit to the construction site with questions about the completion date. ” I used to write my letters by that fountain,” She is quoted saying. “Nothing helps me find the right words like the sound of water.”
What is unique about water in designed spaces, that’s astonishingly hard to explain but it connects us to something so vital that it makes a pleasant difference to use when present. Depending on how one’s water system has been set up, it doesn’t simply change how we feel, but drastically impacts the way we think and interact with others. If done correctly (and properly waterproofed), fountains change ordinary spaces to extraordinary tailored areas where people desire to spend more time, socialize, and revisit.
I don’t need to tell you how much recovery I’ve had to do for a flood disaster. My heart still races when a potential client orders an “office waterfall” feature, because, if I’m honest, I still suffer from PTSD from watching water gush out of at least four ceiling tiles. But my understanding of water and how it interacts with spaces has grown exponentially. As has my understanding of fail-safe drainage systems, waterproof sensor housings, and maintenance schedules.
Every now and then I remember the spider: the small, yet sophisticated engineer responsible for the intricate web that shattered my supremely sophisticated system. I choose to frame my every new project thinking about the lesson on hubris, unpredictability, and self-destructive systems. Just like any other element of nature, water is not an inert component in our designs. And when present, they have a role, often much more than our imagination runs wild anticipating, in the construction process.
The best thing we can do is plan around that consistent force, accommodating for the numerous fuel sources that are bound to go out of control at some point, and keeping our heads level to the weight of the world’s natural phenomena. A good shop vac doesn’t hurt either. Just in case.
