Casey Castillo turns dreams into rock-hard reality

Originally published Saturday, January 8, 2000

By JON HAHN  
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

It looks like any other Puget Sound neighborhood of modest homes and tall trees, but Amy and Casey Castillo's yard is a magical kingdom of gargoyles and enchanted frogs and wee fairy ponds and quietly gurgling fountains.

And in the quaint wooden workshop perched out over the cedar-crested ravine in their back yard, giant mountain king boulders and other marvelous things grow from Casey's fecund mind. For he is the spark plug, the electricity and the driving force behind something called Natural Creations in Rock and Water.

And right here in the Gregory Heights part of Burien, he is designing huge mountainous boulders and stone pillars that will be part of multimillion-dollar waterfront developments, private estates and retreats, zoos and theme parks and millionaires' private castles.

"But we liked this area originally because our first apartment was right across the street from St. Francis of Assisi," said Amy Castillo. "And now, in this house, we're only a couple miles away, and two of our (three) children go to school there. We love the area."

The man who makes movable mountains (because they're hollow molded concrete) says the gargoyles and enchanted frogs "are something our artists wanted to do, in between our major projects. Because we work with architects and general contractors, much of our work is six to eight months out, and we're always bouncing from one project to another."

So the actual production of his ersatz mountain rocks and grottos can be done anywhere. Which is why he's just leased several acres out on the Renton-Issaquah Road, where his dozen or so workers are creating the molds for new projects. Currently, they're creating molds to make about 90 huge basalt columns and four fountains for the Water's Edge development on the Kirkland waterfront.

But he's also created things like a 90-foot gorilla mountain for Busch Gardens in Florida, an artificial desert environment for the Indianapolis Zoo, tide pools for the Point Defiance Zoo, much of the Asian Elephant area for the Woodland Park Zoo, several displays for the new Washington State Historical Society Museum in Tacoma, a pool and grotto and other stone features for Harriet Bullitt's Sleeping Lady retreat and conference center outside Leavenworth ... and a mind-blowing hot-tub grotto and dual waterfall complex for a Kirkland man's backyard. That one even has a sound system, fiber-optic lights that change colors and a pool deck that was "lifted" from a real canyon floor.

"We have to be able to 'create' any kind of rock, which is one reason I've traveled all over the world to work with rocks," Casey said. He goes shopping for rock surfaces and boulders by schlepping all his molding materials into the wilderness, mixing and applying the molds, removing them from the rock surfaces, cleaning and restoring the area and then schlepping the rock molds back to civilization.

All so that your building's lobby can have a fountain wall that looks all the world like the North Cascades, or like the Grand Canyon, or the Adirondacks. For zoos, the work might also involve developing artificial trees and vines that will hold up to years of use and abuse. "I've worked on more than a dozen zoos all over the country, including Honolulu, and I've learned a lot," said the soft-spoken 37-year-old, who grew up in Burien.

By the time he was in junior high and Highline High, Casey was working with cement forms for his father's E.M. Castillo Construction Co. "After high school, I did four years in the Air Force, including two years in Japan, which is where I think I fell in love with rocks and water gardens," Casey reflected.

After a couple years of building swimming pools and patios and waterfalls for some Texas companies, Casey and his service buddy, Jeff Tobler, drove out to California seeking other work opportunities. "The work with some specialty companies there included more than a year working on exhibits at the Santa Barbara Zoo, and the Embassy Suites Hotel in Oxnard. California's also where I lucked out and began working with Julian George, who had been a major set designer for Disney, among other things," Casey said.

It was while he was creating a desert environment for the Indianapolis Zoo that he met Amy. "It was love at first sight," she conceded. After that first sight, she went to see his work at the zoo. "And I was fascinated at the whole process.

"Casey's extremely generous with his work -- he's open to suggestions, and he lets me and our children help him. When he gives them some concrete, he's giving them confidence in their own creativity. He doesn't tell them where, or how, to put it someplace.

"I remember when I went with him to Hawaii (while he was building displays for the Honolulu Zoo), he let me help him carve some petroglyphs. We like traveling with him, when we're able. Sometimes when he's working away from home, the girls and I will go visit him. It gives us all a chance to grow, individually, and as a family."

Although Casey doesn't want Natural Creations to grow too big, the new production space offers other possibilities. "We're going to try to involve blind workers in the production stages, working with the molds," he said.

Some of that work would involve the garden statuary -- everything from the bird baths to the gargoyles and frogs -- carried in more than 150 garden and landscaping outlets around the country, Casey said.

Much of the excess inventory lives among the ferns and cedars at their home due west of Sea-Tac airport. But no magnificent Castillo grotto or waterfall yet. "It's sorta like the carpenter whose house needs repairs," he quipped. "My house will probably be the last job I get around to!"