Photos by Mike Duhon
Big Fish in a Small Pond
July 1, 2002
When Washington, D.C., architect Michael Beidler began remodeling his Craftsman-style row house on Dupont Circle a few years ago, he considered installing skylights in the master bedroom.
“But I wanted to do something more dynamic and unexpected,” says Beidler. “I’m a swimmer. And by nature I love fish. So when I combined those passions with skylights, I came up with an aquarium in my ceiling.” Actually, it became three aquariums—a triptych of 10-gallon Plexiglas tanks, each stocked with exotic goldfish. “When the sunlight is streaming through in the morning, it creates this really warm wave pattern,” says Beidler. “Lying in bed at night, it’s soothing just to look up at it.” Not to mention that it gives a new twist to the concept of sleeping with the fishes.
But then, contemporary aquarists and designers are putting a new spin on aquariums for homes and businesses. Long gone are the days of guppies and five-gallon tanks on spindly-legged stands. Those on the cutting edge of the aquarium business are growing accustomed to creating marine habitats that run tens of thousands of gallons of water and can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. And discriminating clients are no longer satisfied with a ho-hum coral reef habitat. More and more they want an aquarium that duplicates, say, the fragile marine environment of the Galápagos Islands or the aquatic splendor of Africa’s Lake Tanganyika.
“These days, the sky really is the limit,” says Steve Swailes, president of Aquatic Design Systems in San Diego, an 18-year-old firm whose founders, along with many of its current staff, cut their teeth in the aquarium business while working for SeaWorld or the Scripps Institution in nearby La Jolla. “If someone living in Alaska wants an aquarium that reproduces the habitat of the Amazon River basin, then no problem, we can do that.”
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