BOUNTIFUL—After years of designing pipeline inspection tools, James Harris made a bold move. He quit his job and began creating fanciful water features that danced, glowed and fogged.

“It was honestly one of the scariest decisions of my life,” Harris said. “I had enough in my retirement account to last us for six months. If my new business didn’t sustain us, I’d have to go back to my job as an engineer.”

 His wife Kendalyn, current Bountiful City mayor, was a city council member at the time. Three of their four children were still at home. Kendalyn was worried but supportive about James’ new endeavor. They’d been discussing this possibility for years.  

“Something in my gut said you gotta do this,” said James. “I remember walking outside my job as an automation engineer and praying with all my heart, ‘OK God if you’re with me, I really want to do this.’ I went back in and gave my two weeks’ notice.”

The year was 2021. Sapphire Fountains now employs six people with plans to add two or three more this year. In addition to designing and building indoor and outdoor water fountains and walls, the company offers service contracts for existing fountains, rents fountains to events around the country, and creates fountain controls. 

“We've done fountains here along the Wasatch front and had rental fountains in events as far away as Washington, D.C. and Atlanta,” said James. “Just before Halloween we rented a rain curtain to a high school in Chicago for its prom. We’re helping build 13 fountains at a high-end apartment complex at the point of the mountain. We like to call ourselves masters of fountaineering.”

Given James’ lifelong love of all things artistic, it’s not surprising he jumped from tools to fountains. “Even as a kid I loved music, art and design,” said James. “I played in a band. I currently play the trombone in the Bountiful Philharmonia and with a big band jazz group. After years in the oil and gas industry, I started really missing the creative side of life.”

Years before Sapphire Fountains was born, James was at the Gateway on his lunch hour marveling at a splash pad built for the 2002 Olympics. Water jumped, music played and fog floated. “It was fun, artistic and amazing,” remembers James. “I figured there had to be a lot of automation technology behind the scenes, and I wondered if I could create something like that.”

He bought a pump, valve and switches, and built a fountain controller that he tested in his kids’ bathtub. “The water was jumping around and I’d tell the kids to touch it and then I’d turn it off or squirt them,” said James with a smile.

He offered to build the control system for a splash pad in Daybreak in 2007 that is still running. That was his first foray into commercial fountains. He continued to dip his toe into the business on the side. He tried demonstrating one of his fountains at a trade show and it garnered crowds of people fascinated with the jumping water, fog and light. But he didn’t sell a single fountain.

Much has changed since then. Though he wishes the company was growing more quickly, he thinks it is doing quite well. He’s proud of the fountain in front of Myers Mortuary in Ogden that he was involved in from start to finish and many other of his watery expressions of art.

Is playing with water more fun than designing pipeline tools? “The fun is much, much funner,” he said, “but the fear is much, much scarier. People rely on me to pay their bills. There have been plenty of nights I didn’t sleep well. But really cool things are happening and I love what I’m doing. My very favorite thing is watching people take pleasure in my fountains.”