From shallow-water gravity wave theories it is shown that the velocity field in the whole fluid domain can be reconstructed using an analytic transformation (a renormalization). The resulting velocity field satisfies the Laplace equation exactly, which is not the case for shallow-water approximations. Applying the renormalization to the first-order shallow-water solution of limited accuracy, gives accurate simple solutions for both long and short waves, even for large amplitudes. The KdV and Airy solutions are special limiting cases.