About Us

Los Angeles Pond Builder

Los Angeles Pond Builder is a licensed landscape contractor working out of a shop on Venice Boulevard in Mid-City. We design and build ponds, koi ponds, natural swimming ponds, waterfalls, streams, fountains and stormwater basins, and we maintain, clean and repair water features across Los Angeles County. We have been digging holes and filling them with water here since 2011.

How Long We Have Been Doing This

We started in 2011 with one truck, a rented mini excavator and a list of back yard ponds in the east Valley. What began as a handful of gardens is now pond construction, water features and maintenance across Los Angeles and most of the county around it. Two things grew the work. Lawn removal turned a lot of Los Angeles yards into blank ground that needed a center, and a generation of ponds built in the eighties and nineties reached the age where they either got restored properly or got filled in. We do both. The split today runs roughly half new builds, a third maintenance and restoration, and the rest commercial and stormwater work.

The Story Behind The Company

The company exists because of a pond in Studio City that had been built by a landscaper as a favor. Two feet deep, no skimmer, no bottom drain, a pump sitting on the floor and six small koi in it. It looked wonderful for a year. By the second summer the fish were at 18 inches, the water was pea soup, the owner was dosing algaecide every fortnight and nobody could tell her why. Nothing had gone wrong: it had been built for the fish that went in rather than the fish they would become. We rebuilt it properly and then built the business around getting that part right the first time.

The Crew

Our people are employees rather than a rotating list of subcontractors. Between them they have set boulders on hillside builds in the Palisades, plumbed koi systems for people who keep graded fish, restored century-old Pasadena garden ponds under protected oaks, and dug stormwater basins that had to satisfy a civil engineer. The machine operators know what decomposed granite does that clay does not. The technicians who run the maintenance visits can read a water test rather than just take one. Nobody here reads from a script about excavator access, because the person on the other end of the line has already squeezed a machine through a gate that looked too narrow.

What We Build With

We build in 45-mil EPDM over 8oz geotextile underlayment, with locally quarried stone chosen to match the garden rather than whatever arrived on the last pallet. Filtration comes from the manufacturers whose parts we can get the same week rather than the ones with the best brochure, which matters far more when a pump fails in August. Pumps are variable-speed wherever the budget allows, because the running cost is paid every month for a decade. On koi ponds the drains, chambers and media are specified to koi-keeping standards, and on swimming ponds we build the regeneration zone to proper proportions rather than shrinking it to fit a footprint.

Why We Like The Work

Very little else in construction keeps growing after the invoice is paid. A pond changes over its first year, then keeps changing: the plants fill in, the biofilm settles the water, the fish grow, and a garden that was a rectangle of dirt in March sounds like somewhere else by September. There is variety in it too. A courtyard fountain set on Monday, a hillside waterfall tuned stone by stone on Wednesday, a silted basin dug back out on Friday. Nobody gets bored, and almost nobody who has lived with a pond for a few years wants to go back to a lawn.

If you have a yard you are not using, a pond you have inherited or a noise problem you would rather drown than fence, tell us what the space looks like and we will tell you honestly what belongs in it. Call: (818) 293-2214