“I have to be honest, I was a little intimidated by the project. I’ve never done anything for a habitat or wildlife.”
Even for some of the most experienced pros in the industry, there always seems to be something new to come along once in a while. For Dane Palmero — having started in pool service and repair in the late 1970s and shifting to pool building soon after — one might assume he’d seen it all.
But then the Phoenix Zoo came knocking.
“I belong to a networking group,” Palermo explains, “and there’s a general contractor in there, Homes and Son, that’s done all the work at the Phoenix Zoo for the last 30 or so years. They called me up and said, ‘Dane, we’re going to be building this jaguar exhibit. Would you like to be a part of it?’
“And I go, ‘Yeah, I think that’d be great.’”
And the rest is history. Of course, building a pool or water feature to be used in a commercial context is different from building a residential pool. Even further, designing and building a pool for animals rather than humans is an even larger challenge. But Palmero and the team at Overflow Pools were happy to give it a shot.
It took both teams a bit of courage to successfully merge their experience with building pools and designing animal habitats to create something that would be both functional for the animals and logistically possible.
“I didn’t want to rock the boat,” he says. “They gave me the design that came from a landscape architect, but I looked at it and knew it wouldn’t work how they imagined. But I didn’t want to be arrogant and say that right away. So I slowly worked my way in and brought up some more ideas that would work better.”
But the challenge runs deeper than negotiating a successful layout for the habitat. “They have a lot of rules for things like this. They asked me first, ‘Well, how do you do this?’ And when I answered how I normally would, they’d say we couldn’t, because of a number of concerns with the jaguars getting their claws stuck in the drain, or something like that.
“We had to figure out a way to hide everything that would cause them trouble. We had to hide the channel drain, the return fittings. We had to recess the lights so the jaguar couldn’t get to them with his teeth.”
Everything, from the physical requirements to the behind-the-scenes, was carefully planned and executed.
“The filtration system was pretty involved, for such a little body of water. And even strategically placing the boulders. We had to keep in mind two things: One, you don’t want to place the boulders where people can’t see the jaguar, or where the jaguar can lay behind it. And two, we needed to place them in a way that still makes it possible for the cat to get in and out of the water.
“You know, there’s a lot that goes on at a zoo. As visitors, you don’t think anything of it. But when we were there to work on this habitat, we got to see just about everything.”
With the ribbon-cutting in April, the new and improved jaguar habitat at the Phoenix Zoo in Phoenix, Ariz., has been showing off its new features to the public for the last several months. As for Overflow Pools, will Palmero do anything like this again in the future?
“Oh, I would love to do it again,” he says eagerly.
From residential to commercial, from backyards to habitats, Overflow Pools has shown their tenacity for a job well done and taking on a challenge in earnest, no matter the client.
This article first appeared in the September 2025 issue of AQUA Magazine — the top resource for retailers, builders and service pros in the pool and spa industry. Subscriptions to the print magazine are free to all industry professionals. Click here to subscribe.
