Fabulous fish tanks that make a splash

Pacific blue

This saltwater work of art, which cost $30,000, is meant to mimic an ocean reef 60 feet below the surface, where the water shimmers dark blue before fading to black. The look is achieved with LED lighting.

A project launched in 2007 and completed in December 2011 by Infinity Aquarium Design, this 700-gallon tank divides an ornate bar -- filled with sports collectibles worth millions of dollars -- and an entertainment room in a Los Angeles-area home. A nearby door leads to the beach, says Nic Tiemens, designer and company co-owner.

"This was in the blueprints for the beach house," Tiemens says. "All the filtration equipment is remotely plumbed into (an adjacent) special aquarium-filtration room that also was blueprinted into the design, and that room is surrounded by concrete walls, so you can't hear the machinery. We're pumping almost 7,000 gallons an hour to this tank, but it's silent."

The coral is "decorative," meaning it died and naturally broke loose from a reef. The tank holds fish from all corners of the planet, including green chromis, found in the Indo-Pacific region

Tiemens and his co-owner handle the maintenance for the aquarium, making four-hour visits every other week to hand-scrub the coral pieces and change out about 400 gallons of water. Maintenance costs $1,000 a month.

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Reef madness

Not only are the clownfish and blue tangs alive and well in this saltwater enclave, but the rock also is. The live reef was built by David Hauser, president of the Evanston, Ill.-based Aquarium Professionals Group.

Inside the 260-gallon tank, live rock is glued together with an epoxy to replicate a reef. The cost to duplicate this setup would be $25,000, plus an additional $5,000 for the millwork around the display.

This aquarium, in a Chicago home, is between the dining room and great room. The owners pay Hauser's company $75 per hour to maintain the filtration system and clean the watery habitat, a 2.5-hour job the company completes twice per month.

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Kitchen kaleidoscope

Vibrantly gorgeous, with billowing offshoots of orange and blue, this kitchen aquarium is nonetheless utterly artificial.

The fish are authentic, from passer angelfish to flame hawkfish. But their surroundings are a "faux reef insert," Tiemens says.

For this creation, Infinity Aquarium Design made plaster casts of real coral, forming eurothane duplicates dyed with bright pigments. Those pieces, whose soft-rubber consistency allows them to move within the saltwater, are adhered to a painted background. The cost for this 280-gallon tank in Arcadia, Calif., was $12,000, including the surrounding cabinetry.

The faux reef is bonded into place. Unlike with other tanks, individual, decorative pieces cannot be removed for cleaning. They must be hand-scrubbed with brushes inside the tank to restore their original colors. Maintenance is $400 to $500 per visit.

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Tropical triangulation

This supremely special room divider, filled with 700 gallons of saltwater, gravel and real coral skeletons, is not the sort of giant tank you can simply build to separate your dining and living rooms. The liquid and stony contents, plus the 3-inch-thick acrylic windows that surround them, weigh about 7,000 pounds, Hauser says.

Beneath this Chicago-area aquarium, Hauser's team first needed to reinforce the floor with I-beams welded together as triangles, then cemented into the basement floor.

That same cellar support structure also houses the aquarium's intricate filtration system, which includes an ultraviolet sterilizer to fight disease-carrying organisms that might otherwise bloom. Upstairs, the tank is dressed up with planks of English elm, Hauser says.

The cost: $320,000.

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A river runs through it

Hauser designed and built this aquarium to mimic a North American river, right down to the smallest details. It's a visual splash, filled with game fish, such as trout.

"It's set up just like a section of river. The water feeds from one end and pulls from the other, and it's moving at very rapid rates," Hauser says. "These fish can actually head up current and sit in the current, just as they would in a fast-moving river."

A larger version of this tank lives in a Manistee, Mich., casino. It holds 1,100 gallons and cost $400,000 compared to $50,000 for the home version. Moving that much water requires plenty of machinery, which is tucked in below this aquarium. Huge pumps drive the liquid, a sand filter and a degassing tower to remove the carbon dioxide that the fish produce. A reverse-osmosis system helps keep the water slightly acidic, the way the trout like it. A chilling unit keeps the water in this tank between 40 and 60 degrees. And as the seasons change outside, a computer tweaks the temperature and lighting appropriately.

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See-through sea

Alas, this aquarium is no more. Its home was sold after a foreclosure, and the tank was removed, Tiemens says.

Squeezed between a sitting room and a home theater, this living, aquatic window offered the same view to both spaces. A pair of transparent sides offered views of chunks of decorative coral. The coral pieces were soaked in bleach before installation to boost their natural colors, a common tactic in the super-aquarium business. Banana wrasse and naso tang once swam inside the 350 gallons of saltwater.

The largest challenge for Tiemens and Aquarium Design was where and how to store the machinery that kept the tank healthy. Machine noise was an issue, considering the room was used as a home theater. "The more audible parts, like a water-cooling unit with a condenser, were kept outside the house," Tiemens says.

Maintenance cost $500 per month.

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Aquiline aqua-scape

As you round the corner in the family room of this Florida home, you'll gaze upon angelfish and clownfish.

The tank holds 260 gallons of saltwater, plus bleached coral, LED lighting and about 200 pounds of live rock. It cost the owners about $15,000, says the designer, Pat "Scooter" Moyer, owner of Scooter's Exotics and Aquatics in Noblesville, Ind.

While the external wall offers a clean, finished look, the owners access the tank for feeding and cleaning through louvered doors in an adjacent room behind the setup, Moyer says. Also back there: the filtration system, a chiller and an ultraviolet water sterilizer.

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Shark tank

With its gently bowed front and an astonishing 4,500 gallons of saltwater, this mammoth aquarium contains critters with a bit more bite than nice, "Nemo"-type, tropical fish.

This bad boy holds blacktip reef sharks and moray eels. Inside the tank is live rock, farmed in an environmentally sensitive way, as well as "lace rock" that was mined in Montana and now forms a cave, says Hauser, whose company designed it.

To maintain a healthy habitat for the sharks and eels, Hauser attached a "big commercial filtration system" in the basement, a five-horsepower chiller and a "huge" reverse-osmosis tank, he says. The equipment room alone in the celebrity-owned Montana home is 18 by 22 feet, Hauser says.

"It's a very dangerous tank to clean," Hauser says. "One person (a technician hired by the owner) gets inside the tank with a snorkel. A second person sits up on top, plays safety man and watches.

"The sharks leave you alone. But the safety man has to watch the morays, which like to sneak up on you and nibble on your ears or elbow -- anything that smells like food to them."

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Sharp corner, soft light

The engineering challenge on 90-degree-angled tanks like this one is when to marry and meld the sharp, transparent corners. For this aquarium in a Chicago family room, Moyer chose 1-inch-thick acrylic panels.

The eye-catching lighting is provided by LEDs, which give the water its glow but don't overheat the liquid. Costs for units such as this range from $15,000 to $20,000. The price is generally lower if a super-aquarium is installed as the room or house is being constructed, Moyer says.

As for the machinery to keep the tropical fish healthy and the saltwater clean, the components in this piece are similar to Moyer's rounded-corner tank: a filtration system, a chiller and an ultraviolet water sterilizer.

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African lake

Welcome to Lake Tanganyika, an African great lake -- or, technically, a small version of it.

The lace rock inside the tank is cemented together to mimic the steep underwater cliffs in that lake. Hauser, a trained zoologist, chose fish called cichlids that are native to the lake, he says. The tank has 300 gallons of fresh water and is in the living room of a condominium on the north side of Chicago.

"We made it look like a rock wall with lots of ledges and caves," Hauser says, adding that the cost of this built-in tank now runs between $15,000 and $20,000. "Rift lake cichlids, as a rule, live on the face of these walls and graze on algae on the wall. The nice thing is these fish are extremely easy to care for."

Maintenance is about $150 monthly.

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