The tour wouldn't have been complete without a trip to view the decorative concrete around Cinderella Castle in the Magic Kingdom.

It's All in the Details

If you think you've got fastidious clients who want a particular shade of this and just the right texture of that, hold on to your mouse ears. As sure as supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is the longest word in the English language, few people are as meticulous as the folks at Disney.

For example, let's take the courtyard between the large likenesses of Lady and the Tramp at the new Disney's Pop Century Resort in Orlando, Florida. “We were given a tape of the movie and were told to watch it,” says Steve Martin, regional manager of key accounts for L.M. Scofield Company, which supplied much of the stains, color hardeners, stamping tools, skins and other incidentals that were used to create the hardscapes at the resort. “All the colors and textures used for that streetscape were taken from that film. They had to match exactly.”

(Above and below) The Bowling Pin Pool area at Pop Century Resort features concrete “wood planks” created with products from L.M. Scofield Company.

To create Animal Kingdom, which features a safari ride, Martin says he was given five samples of dirt from the Serengeti, a plain in northwest Tanzania where there is a large wildlife reserve. Scofield developed custom-matched color hardeners and also matched the textures with concrete to make the park's hardscapes look like rugged terrain.

And, unless someone pointed it out, you probably had no idea it wasn't. The rudimentary-looking roadways have ruts, dips and deep tire tracks. “On the safari ride, the trucks are riding on cast-in-place concrete, not mud,” Martin says. Joe Rhody, the lead designer for Disney, dubbed the rustic concrete “designer dirt.”

Martin says he and others involved with Disney projects work closely with the Imagineering team — the master planning, creative development, design, engineering, production, project management and research and development arm of The Walt Disney Co. In short, Martin explains, “They're Disney's think tank.”

Disney's Pop Century Resort, which celebrates pop culture of the 20th century in a big way, is a colorful addition to the attraction's hotel lineup.

From concept through installation, they're the ones behind the creation of all Disney resorts, theme parks and attractions, real estate developments, regional entertainment venues and new media projects. And, above all, “Those guys are all about detail. Everything has to be just so,” he says.

The scoop on Pop Century
According to Jeff Kelly, a project manager with Centex Rooney who served as assistant project manager on the Pop Century Resort project, 124 colors and 45 custom-matched caulk colors were used to complete the hardscape for Phase I of the resort, which focuses on the pop culture of each decade of the last 50 years of the 20th century. (No timetable has been set to begin Phase II, which will highlight the 1900s through the 1940s.)

Of the wide array of colors used, “I'd say 15 to 20 colors were off-the-shelf Scofield colors,” Kelly estimates. “The rest were custom matched to color chips” or to specific shades on the Pantone color key.

The concrete near the '60s-themed Hippy Dippy Pool at Pop Century Resort features bright custom colors created with Scofield's Lithochrome color hardener.

Ground was broken on Phase I of the Pop Century project in June 1999 and completed in April 2002. Between April 2001 and April 2002, Kelly says, they poured just over 9,000 cubic yards and hand finished 450,000 square feet of concrete. Of the overall $128 million contract, $3.4 million was devoted to the hardscape package.

Phase I of Pop Century included 10 lodge buildings and 2,880 rooms, six pool buildings and four pools — one shaped like a bowling pin in the '50s section, another like a flower from the '60s complemented by a sunflower-shaped kiddy pool, and the fourth in the shape of an '80s computer monitor. “We raised the pool deck and used a resilient-rubber material to make a giant keyboard,” Kelly says.