BROACH the subject of fountains, and people tend to unravel slightly, as if recalling their childhood, a favorite food or some particular delight. It is as if they, and only they, truly appreciate a fountain's manifold charms. I used to do this, until I noticed others also claiming the same degree of regard. At some point it struck me: It's primal. Everyone loves a fountain.
Civilization has only been possible where there is water or where water can be imported. After drinking, bathing and irrigating crops, any society lucky enough to have water left over has responded by exalting it in fountains. As the ability to pump water farther and farther from natural sources improved, fountain design became ever more euphoric. Water was spilled over stone stairs, spouted from fonts, settled in reflecting pools and spit from booby traps. Fountains contained images of gods, kings, sprites, nymphs, frogs. There were religious fountains, ribald ones, heroic models and the stillest of pools for contemplation.
To get a sense of the giddy progression through the ages, one needn't go to the Taj Mahal, Granada, Tivoli, Chatsworth or Versailles. The nearest garden center with a fountain yard will do. There is a fountain for every conceivable architectural style, and more than a few for inconceivable ones. A combination of choice and availability, however, has its pitfalls. Plants may come and go. Fountains are for life. As the owner of a double-bowled "Spanish" fountain with four lion heads, I can attest that the day my fountain was delivered, it was there to stay. It weighed almost 800 pounds dry.
I love the voluptuous setting of the two basins fed by an artichoke-shaped spout at the top. But to this day I'm not sure what possessed me with the motif. Why lions? I'm a dog person.
The answer as to how spitting lions heads came to adorn fountains is surely embedded somewhere in the 4,000-year history from the reflecting pools of ancient Araby to the water show outside the Bellagio in Las Vegas. For all I know, my fountain might contain a sacred reference to the Lion of the Tribe of Judah; it might represent a Freemason's belief system carved around a bowl, or it simply might mean that some early fountain carver enjoyed rendering lions.
What I do know is that, in the case of my four lions, Italians imported the style. A. Silvestri Co., a Bay Area firm that made my fountain and serves many Southern California showrooms, was founded by a Tuscan. It has for the last half-century scaled down some of the most heroic and whimsical fountains of Europe for the American home market.
"When we started," says its founder, Luigi Silvestri, "most fountains were Mediterranean and classic." But now, he says, American tastes are changing. "Now we make a new one every year," he says. "Modern. Old. Wall. We never know what's going on." Asked if most of the other fountain makers around San Francisco are Italian, Silvestri laughs and says, "Most are my family."
Cathy Hough, general manager of the Marina del Rey Garden Center in Venice, oversees one of the best stocks of ready-made fountains in Los Angeles. She has eight suppliers, including Silvestri. Standing by a dark, stained, seemingly less Italian and more pueblo-style model, she slaps it affectionately and says that it comes from a rival firm called Giannini Garden Ornaments. "Silvestri's daughter."
Hough leaves style and iconography to the customer. Her job is providing choice. Simple urns with subtle cascading overflows? She's got it. Spitting lions, Egyptian frescoes, ye olde horse troughs, Mission? Check, check, check, check. Terra cotta-like finishes? Yep. Iron? You bet. Marble effect? Absolutely. Resin models so light they could be suspended from drywall? Those too.
The one area where she will intervene is if a customer tries to buy a fountain without seeing water run in it. If one is dry on her lot, or any lot, ask the vendor to fill it. Watching light catch droplets whipped by an ocean breeze from a two-tier scallop shell number, I take her point.
As a hummingbird lights on the top fount of a multi-tiered bowl fountain much like my own, I am reminded why I chose the same general arrangement. However, moments later, in another corner of the yard, listening to a simpler model, where the water overflowed gently down all sides of the bowl rather than from four spitting lions, I realized that I preferred the gentler sound from the evenly cascading model.
The music created by falling water is so important to landscape architect Mia Lehrer of the Los Angeles firm Mia Lehrer + Associates that she urges her clients to start thinking about sound before shape.
"I always ask: 'Are you looking for something rambunctious? Or something that's soothing and more integrated into the sounds of nature?' " One client, the mother of a toddler, decided a favorite sound was her son and a friend peeing. "So we ended up with a fountain with two little spouts."
