Norco, CA, October 4 - In an effort to provide more public access to fresh water and reduce the use of plastic bottles, QCP partnered with Linespace’s Max Beach to design the LA Bottle Filler & Drinking Fountain.
The LA Bottle Filler is an adaptation of the best-selling LA Drinking Fountain, and it’s available in two styles: the standalone bottle filler and the double-armed bottle filler and drinking fountain. With the latter, the bowls are set to an ADA-compliant height on one side and a standard height on the other.
“Our approach to it was to maintain some of the recognizable form lines so it could work as a family of products, but also as a clean, standalone unit,” Beach says. “The idea was to look at how these might be installed and how they might be used.”
Visibility was also important, and Beach explains that they wanted to make it obvious that this was a bottle filler people could approach in a park, corporate campus, university, and other similar spaces. To address this need, a windscreen was added to communicate its function as a bottle filler. Beach and Gilio-Tenan also worked together to update the look of the original LA Water Fountain.
“The new LA Bottle Filler has clean lines and it’s contemporary,” Gilio-Tenan says. “It feels very of-the-time.”
For this project, Beach says it all boiled down to the technical elements, which included sourcing the proper hardware required and aligning with the manufacturing flow at QCP. The team also purchased competitive products to better understand the process and complexities involved.
“It was an iterative process,” he says. “We did probably about a dozen concepts internally, narrowed it down to about four directions, and that ultimately came down to two of the four that made the family.”
Gilio-Tenan was also able to take the team’s sketches and renderings and transform them into three-dimensional models, streamlining the communication and approval process. After observing the models, they could easily make adjustments to make it more simplified and manufacturable. This more in-depth communication was especially important because this concept was new to everyone contributing to the project.
“As both a client and collaborator, QCP really has a good track record with us as far as communicating what the desires are or what the goals and needs are, so it goes back and forth,” Beach says.
If you want to see the LA Bottle Filler and more products up close, make sure to stop by booth #3631 at the ASLA Conference from Sunday, October 6 to Wednesday, October 9 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C.