John Crystal Pools

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Custom Designs, Textures Offer Oasis Lifestyles: Bringing the feel of the Pacific and a touch of Yosemite into backyards, John Crystal makes dreams come true. By Lisa B. Leff - Special to the Time Northridge- John Crystal is in the business of making the California dream come true. He does it with wheelbarrows and Bobcats plaster and rebar colored concrete and paving stones, electrical wires and PVC piping. The dream, of course, is the backyard swimming pool. During his twenty-three years as an independent pool contractor, Crystal estimates that he has completed more than seven hundred pool projects in San Fernando and Ventura counties and neighboring environs. None of the pools exactly alike in appearance or the challenges they presented. He has worked gravity-defying pools into hillside, dug pools by hand in yards to small to accommodate excavating equipment and used real sand and a specially designed filtration system to give a pool’s owners the feeling that they were wading into the Pacific. His most towering achievement may be the forty-foot waterfall that he erected four years ago behind a Glendale estate out of river rock imported from the Sierra Nevada near Yosemite. Yet he is equally proud of the petite pool and Jacuzzi he squeezed into a thirty- foot long yard of a home in Marina Del Rey last year. Despite the yard’s Lilliputian proportions, the owner wanted to be able to exercise in the pool so Crystal installed a “swimming system” that generates an artificial current. “One of my subcontractors has a saying ‘We are building a better tomorrow’. And as corny as that sounds, I think it’s true,” Crystal said. “If we have done our job right, the end result of our work is we have made our customers’ lives more enjoyable and exciting” Crystal, who now commutes by private plane from his home near Newport Beach to his Northridge office, got his start in the swimming pool business by cleaning pools while a student at Pierce College. After learning how to repair filters and heaters, he founded his own pool service company. He sold that company and launched John Crystal Pools at twenty-five, when he obtained his pool contractor’s license. Due to his experience Crystal age forty-eight is today one of the most sought-after custom pool builders in the region. He gets loads of referrals from theatrical agents and other members of the entertainment industry, and his celebrity clients have included author Michael Crichton and rocker Tommy Lee. He also works closely with landscape designers, and one of his projects was featured in a recent issue of Sunset Magazine. But he says his biggest single source of new business is mothers who decide they want to take the plunge after seeing their children splashing about in a classmate’s pool. Business is so good right now that Crystal says he cannot take all the jobs that come his way, even with his typical six and half day workweek and full-time staff of five.

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