The story of a Spokane venture started by a self-described homebody begins a half a world away.


It was early 2000 when Pete Smith founded the business, called Mainstream Watergarden Construction, out of his Spokane home. Instead of relying on pond and fountain projects from nearby businesses and homeowners to get started, Mainstream landed a flood of business from its first customer, which wanted to have a major job done in Sendai City, Japan.


In that project, Mainstream undertook design and construction of a meandering 300-foot-long stream and two connected ponds outside a private elementary school in Sendai City, a city of more than 1 million people about 150 miles north of Tokyo. Smith had built a relationship with the Japanese businessmen who hired him for the school job during an earlier trip to Japan, when he built a water feature while working for another Spokane-based company.


Mainstream since has built a similar water featurewhich also includes a stream the length of a football fieldat a Sendai City corporate park, and it expects to take on another big job this fall for a software company in China.


Its an important part of the business, Smith says of the Far East work. Its been lucrative for me.


In the past two years, Mainstream also has found work in the Spokane area. Its jobs here have been nearly exclusively residential projects, though not just backyard fish ponds.


It currently is building a 10,800-square-foot swimming pond at a home in the Valleyford area, south of Spokane. Like a conventional swimming pool, the pond will include both a shallow end and a deep end. On this pool, however, the deep endabout two-thirds of the poolwill be separated from the shallow end by a series of boulders, the tops of which will poke out of the water and serve as stepping stones. Additional rocks will be placed and bushes will be planted along the edges of the man-made swimming pool to give it the look of a natural pond. All man-made supplies, such as concrete linings and water-pump systems, will be camouflaged as much as possible by the natural elements.


Ive always strived to make the water features look as natural as possible, Smith says. The goal is to make people think, Wow! Has that always been there?


Smith doesnt have a water feature at his own house just yet. He and his wife, Wendy, just bought a new home on a five-acre parcel in the Mead area. If work at Mainstream winds down later this summer, he plans to build a grandiose water feature there with a combination of a stream and waterfall, a pond, and a fountain. The feature will be used both for his familys enjoyment and as a showroom of sorts for Mainstream, he says.


In its only commercial project on this side of the Pacific Ocean so far, Mainstream built a similar outdoor showroom behind Rock Placing Co., on Trent Avenue in the Spokane Valley. Rock Placing, which provides rock for landscaping projects, including Mainstreams jobs, uses the water feature to show prospective clients potential uses for its stone.


Its water feature includes a stream and a five-foot waterfall that spills over basalt columns into a pond stocked with koi carp. At the other end of the pond is another stone column with a fountain burbling out of it.


Mainstream hopes to do more commercial jobs like that one and the ones in Japan, he says.


Were really small, so its hard to get those bigger jobs, Smith says.


Mainstream employs just one other person in addition to Smith and his wife, and hires additional laborers and specialty subcontractors on a contract basis.


Smith says the company designs and builds three basic types of water features: sterile, live, and koi. All look similar, but have subtle differences, he says.


Sterile ponds, such as the one Mainstream is constructing in Valleyford, are chlorinated like a swimming pool and dont support fish or plant life. Live ponds support fish and plant life. Koi ponds simply are deep live ponds in which large koi can live. They typically are built with several rock overhangs that the fish can swim under for protection from predators, which is essential in Spokanes raccoon-populated neighborhoods.


Between sterile and live ponds, Smith recommends the live, because fish and plants create their own tiny ecosystem and naturally take care of most unwanted algae and a lot of insects.


Smith says koi ponds are becoming more popular and a more prevalent portion of his work, so much so that hes joined the Spokane Koi Water Garden Society here.


When building a water feature, Smith says he tries to work with the natural landscape, moving as little earth as possible. He says he typically will survey a site by eye, then return to his home office and sketch out what he hopes to do. Also, unless a client requests otherwise, he uses stone similar to that found in the areain the Spokane area, that means he uses mostly granite and basalt.


The cost of the residential ponds Mainstream constructs depends on the size of the pond and how much rock is used, but generally range from $5,000 to $20,000, though they can cost more than that.


On the projects in Japan, Mainstreams customer paid separately for all the labor and materials, so the Spokane company received a fee just for design and construction management. It received $45,000 for the first job and $18,000 for the second. Smith says that while the second job was similar in size to the first, he didnt spend as much time in Japan the second time, and he also gave the client a discounted rate.


He says he doesnt know the overall cost of the projects in Japan.


As part of his work on the last project in Japan, Smith was asked to pick out the stones that would go alongside a meandering stream. Instead of going to the Japanese equivalent of Spokanes Rock Placing, Smith was asked to go into the mountains near Sendai City and pick out boulders there. He says he and his client walked around with a large crane following behind them, picking up the big rocks Smith chose.


The people over there are great, Smith says. I like staying home, but as long as they have jobs for me, Ill go over there.