Air to awe: no one else wanted to take on this extreme slope--except one adventurous California builder.

When married attorneys Lee Feldman and Gina Browne moved into their posh Hollywood Hills home, they longed for a picturesque pool.

"The view is so spectacular," Feldman says. "We wanted to see how it would look at night with the city lit up and this pool extending out with water flowing

The couple had a problem, though. There was no yard.

The rear of the house offered a tiny terrace, but the property immediately dropped off at a 1:1 slope toward a street below. Most pool builders wouldn't touch it. "I never heard back from them," Feldman says of the builders he approached. "One builder just left a plan at my door without ringing the doorbell and drove off."

Besides the extreme slope, there was a total lack of access. Electrical and telephone lines wouldn't allow a crane to reach over the house, so caissons had to be constructed on site. But a standard drilling rig couldn't fit through the side yard. "[The builders] would have to hand-dig the caissons, then hand-assemble the steel columns," Feldman says. "Nobody was willing to do that."

Only one builder signed on: Don Goldstone, president of Ultimate Water Creations in Beverly Hills, Calif. Now the couple has the aquascape of their dreams--a contemporary, vanishing-edge rectangular pool with gutter overflow on three sides. A perimeter-overflow spa caps the scene. They even have a grassy area and landscaping for a complete backyard.

Though it took $500,000 and two years of heroic construction efforts, the blood, sweat and tears finally paid off.

Stage one

Before Goldstone and company could build, they had to fix the access problem. The 5-foot-wide side walkway ended with a dangerously steep drop. After demolishing the concrete walkway, crews dug into the decomposed granite prevalent throughout the site to form a usable, temporary ramp.

"It took us probably a week to create that ramp," Goldstone says.

The workers also needed a staging area where they could operate machinery and maneuver the caissons. To create it, they had to grade out from the hill, retaining enough flat earth to support the men and machinery. They constructed a temporary retaining wall made of rebar, railroad ties, wood beams and plywood to hold the earth. The builder needed something sturdy yet removable.