Gardens
Upscale Ecosystem
Much more than a room created for swimming and gardening, Don Julian built the “Big Kahuna” of all sunrooms.

Not only is it more than a “sunroom,” it’s also more than a pool area or “outdoor” living space, and it has more square footage than many homes in Kansas City — combined. What is it? It’s the one and only 5,000-square-foot solarium of builder Don Julian.

Before building the home Don and his wife, Linda, live in now, located in the gated West Shore Estates of Riss Lake, the Julians and their kids lived in Shawnee for 21 years. One day, Don went outside to measure the square footage of their backyard, which was surrounded by trees and included a 30,000-gallon pool. When Linda approached him, worried that he was going to put more work into the backyard, he simply said, “I’m going to build a house and take the space we have back here and put it under glass.” After the year and a half it took Sunshine Rooms of Wichita to complete the solarium, Don was able to bring his outside in. “I just didn’t want to clean up leaves ever again,” he notes.

Inside the solarium, everything draws attention. The 3,800-gallon koi pond delicately morphs into a waterfall dropping into a 3,000-gallon pond, which is occupied by about 30 Japanese koi. The 17,000-gallon freeform swimming pool is fish-free and used every other weekend by the Julians’ grandkids. Don and Linda also enjoy getting in once in awhile with their 6-month-old granddaughter, providing swimming lessons at an early age. The spa, which features fiber-optic lighting, seats six and overflows into the pool.


The pool sports a sand/pebble finish — no ceramic tile in this room — with the top of the pool’s perimeter decked out in moss rock from Arkansas to give it a natural look. Also helping bring in a touch of the outside are more than 150 plants Don and Linda keep in the solarium year-round. Other than the 6-foot-tall bird of paradise flowers and palm trees dotting the room, a variety of other flowering plants and grasses fill the air with freshness, from pygmy date palm, zebra grass and bromeliad to philodendrons, azaleas, roses and bamboo. “It’s like a jungle,” Don says. “And when snow is on the ground outside, you can sit in the pool inside.”

To make a place like this run smoothly, it takes major behind-the-scenes effort — and Don’s “crew” couldn’t be better equipped. When temperatures drop below freezing, the
350,000-BTU boiler kicks into action, heating the flagstone floor by running hot water through tubing underneath. On colder days when that system’s not enough, Don’s four computer-controlled 10-ton dehumidification systems join in, one at a time as needed, but they’ve rarely been used. “It’s really like a huge air conditioner that takes moisture out of the air. It’s how you get ‘desert air,’ as they call it,” Don explains.

Enclosing the space is a NanaWall system, which is a series of exterior folding French doors that Don has used on each side of the room to open to the outside. With the press of a button, phantom screens drop down, keeping bugs out and fresh air and children in. The screens are made of “invisible mesh,” which Don says his dog has run into several times. The glass panels used in the solarium are, like the rest of the room’s features, top-quality. “We did everything you can do to glass to make it more energy-efficient,” Don says.

The thermal-pane, argon-filled windows are also tempered, tinted green (for solar shading) and have a super low-e coating as well as a protective ceramic frit surface. The 50 electric windows (with the power of 12 fans mounted within the glass) surrounding the solarium’s lantern open to circulate air and have the same “bells and whistles” as the other windows. A huge wall of native stone on the south and west ends of the room, known as a Trombe wall, acts as a thermal mass, storing heat during the day and releasing it back into the room at night.

When muscles are tired and “fins” need a break from swimming, Don and his family and friends retreat to the fully equipped 25-foot-long wet bar, complete with a solid surface
countertop, refrigerator and freezer drawers, combination ice maker and fridge, and a built-in 60-inch flat-screen TV that rises up from the countertop and swivels so it can be seen from the pool. A touch-screen panel by the bar controls everything in the solarium.

When transforming this hot spot into party central, Don turns on his fully automated control system that can play 400 DVDs and 350 CDs at the touch of a button. But that’s not what grabs people’s attention. “I think the margarita machine gets the most attention out there,” he says.