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Waterforms
Making the casino environment aesthetically fresh and visually attractive is a challenge faced by operators around the world – and that’s where Waterforms International can help with their appealing water-based designs…
Las Vegas casinos have made it a near- art form, the water feature; the Bellagio’s fountains attracts thousands of people every day to the front of the casino, and until last year, Treasure Island’s pirate shows were one of the Strip’s highlights. Even the sound of water is generally recognised as calming, and a well-designed water-based attraction can be a highlight of any casino.
Dirk Slotboom, Managing Director of (and a designer for) Waterforms International, spoke to Casino International about the company, what they do and how they work…
Casino International: What does Waterforms do, exactly?
Dirk Slotboom: We have a multi-role function: we design, we construct, we manufacture, and we maintain.
What we’ve found over the years is traditionally we come in more on the engineering side of projects, and it’s mainly water-related projects we do, but we’ve also done many unusual engineering projects. Clients these days, are looking for something unusual and different, they want to have a competitive edge, or they want people to enjoy a certain aspect of their development whether it be commercial, foyer space, or an entertainment facility. We work with the client, help develop what their expectations are then we come up with concepts. We then look at the feasibility and costing for the concepts. This is an important step, as each time we create something new you have a wow factor, but it also has a dollar factor, a money trifurcation, from there we generally try to focus in very quickly in which direction we’re going financially for that wow factor.
It’s mainly water we work with, but what we’re finding is happening more recently is that we’re looking at the overhaul project where we’re integrating finishes, structure, interior design, exterior design or the architectural design within the development of what we’re working with. We’re creating something new and exciting, we’re working with different materials. We generally try to work with natural materials, but we also work with man-made materials. We’ve been introducing fire, lighting, music, noise, sound effects, fog, and these sorts of things where we’re enhancing the project. As I said earlier we’re mainly working from a water background, where we’re creating interesting and unusual water effects.
CI: Does a customer tend to come to you with an idea of what they want, and you realise it, and you bring your own skills and expertise to the table – or do you get a blank slate, people know they want something but don’t know what they want?
DS: It can happen various ways; sometimes a client will have a high-profile architect, interior designer, or an artist that’s come up with the concept and they say this is what they want you to do, and that they want that person because they’re very well known internationally, but as a client may be excited about their concepts, often its feasibility hasn’t worked out. So we might get drawn in to work it the suitability and cost of what that person or organisation has put together. As our work is specialised we find, there’s very few people who can work out the feasibility and cost that idea and even work out if it can potentially be done.
That’s one way. Another way is if the customer knows what we do, we are told the budget, the customer wants something to work in this space, we might work with the customer’s architect and interior designers. We use our in-house design team to develop the produce the idea. So we’ve got the ability to be the artist, the designer, and the advantage is we very quickly work out if that concept’s feasible and cost it before it goes too far. What we find a lot with customers including casinos and big developments, they get a high-profile person in, they suggest a concept but it’s not feasible because they don’t know how to test if their concept’s work. We're involved, because customers know what we do, our recommendation comes mainly from word of mouth and our proven track record. The customer will say listen guys, we want you to do this and so we’ll work the project out with them and put it together. We come with a team, that all contributes to the project to get a really good result, because we’re drawing from different in-house expertises, the results have been very good.
CI: Where’s your main market?
DS: We’ve got a bit of work happening in the Middle East, in Malaysia, Singapore… The world’s become a lot smaller, so realistically if we’re working internationally, it’s no different if we were working in other States or in another town. The only difference is a bit of a time lag. We’re doing some development work now for a casino in Darwin [Australia, where Waterforms is based], we work for Tabcorp which is a major player with casinos in different States within Australia, we’re working in Queensland, New South Wales, Tasmania, we’re all over Australia, and I’ve got an ongoing commitment in London, which is a three-year contract.
It’s really hard to break into the American market, but a lot of international people know who we are and they value our work.
CI: So what’s the project in England?
DS: The Australian War Memorial in Hyde Park Corner. We’re responsible for the water effects and assisted the artist and the architects in working out the water effects. The Australian government thought it pretty important and because of our technical expertise and our understanding of natural materials, we’ve been on a rolling three-year contract with Veteran Affairs which manages the asset, we’re assisting them with their assets in Australia.
Our expertise just doesn’t go to the engineering, we’ve got a good grasp of material sciences and how to preserve them in especially in polluted areas like London.
It is often said that water’s the universal solvent, and given time water will dissolve anything; that’s quite true and with the mismatch of materials we use, we’ve had to do a lot of work to ensure the project is still around for years to come. We’ve worked hard on achieving balance in the water, so that if we’re using water in the environment, we can treat it so there’s no bugs growing in there, but equally important we don’t corrode things away, we keep things in a pristine state.
One of the things we’ve been doing over the last year and a half is a lot more work with LED lights, and what we’ve found is when you’ve have different finishes and colours, the LEDs can create different light gradings and different colours. The LEDs can really punch out the different materials or water effects. We’re able to programme what colour we want to get different parts of the project to feature out at varying times, because we find certain colours complement one another and different materials. We’ve been really excited the last few years and we’ve found that that’s given us an extra ‘wow’ factor that we hadn’t realised because of the control ability within the LED. We use LEDs supplied from ULA which are manufactured in the Czech Republic, and they’re very low energy to run. With our work in 24hour facilities like casino’s power savings over a year can be quite substantial when LEDs are used. The LEDs also give us that extra wow factor you wouldn’t normally get. It’s quite a package.
CI: It sounds really challenging…
DS: We’ve had to work smart and clever. There’s a lot of time and a lot of effort required to get a really good product on the ground and a really good feature quite often comes from simple ideas. Simple things are the hardest to do. You can spend hours and hours making these really complicated systems but at the end of the day, one of the overall things that our clients say is Waterforms, when you can get them on board, what you do is you get a really robust system, it may not be the Lamborghini or Ferrari, you're getting the Mercedes, it has very little maintenance and they’re just bulletproof and they keep on going and going. Hey, that’s a very good recommendation from our customers.
CI: Recycling and re-using water must be a significant part of what you do, as the public are more aware of the scarcity of natural resources now, so businesses are trying to respond to that.
DS: Here in Australia, we’ve been in a drought, but fortunately our designs, even though we’re in drought-affected areas , we can have recirculated systems that use reclaimed water from various sources. We’re looking at grey water [water reclaimed from sewerage, for example], we’re looking at storm water that we can get from the site, we polish up the water to use in our systems, we collect a lot of rain water, we have looked at subterranean water… One of the things that we can do in places like Adelaide, where there’s some significant problems with water, is to create your own aquifer, when we have an abundance of water during the rainy months, we can pump water into the ground. A water storage tank under ground is created, so that when you’re in dry periods and you need a top up, you start pumping that water back into the feature; that doesn’t work everywhere, that only works when you’ve got the right subterranean structure.
Environmental issues play a big factor in our designs; in London for example, one of the big problems is that the water is very hard; if you’ve got a kettle and you keep boiling it, you’ve got these kettle stones, with the London War Memorial where it’s wet and dry, it wouldn’t take long to get a calcium buildup. What we do is we put a water softener in there, we treat that, we take all of the impurities out of the water, treat the water so that it’s non corrosive and we keep recirculating the water. Most other installations in London, when they get dirty they just dump the water, clean it out then fill it up again. The Lady Diana fountain loses 50 per cent of its water to the Serpentine Lake and tops up continually from ground waters; not the Australia War Memorial. It holds the water; it cleans it, and reuses it.
www.waterforms.com.au
