Natural Swimming Pool

In 2003, a couple named Ashcroft contacted us and asked if we could do something about their swimming pool. Both the house and the pool had been built almost side by side in the 1940s. The pool featured the erstwhile popular “lagoon style”, which is still in use today by some of the world’s larger, tropical resorts. Since moving in, however, the Ashcroft’s had always felt this design was too ostentatious. What they wanted was the feeling of the tropics more in the form of a personal paradise, not a backyard tourist zone.

We agreed with their sentiment. Their property was much more suited to a natural swimming pool design than either the lagoon style or the standard design. The land was located on the side of a hill that sloped down toward a ravine, and the house was built about 40 feet back from the road. In order to redesign the pool into something that looked more natural, we had to strip the entire structure down to its shell and build a retaining wall to offset the grade of the land.

We then dug out the ground surrounding the shell into a deeper basin that allowed water to collect naturally. We used a series of interlocking pavers to make a flat surface that extended from the back of the home to the retaining wall. This created a very natural and pristine compliment to our natural swimming pool, which now looked like an inviting portal into a remote island getaway, just a stone’s throw away from the back of the house.

We created an easier access to the pool by building two series of stone steps that led down to either side of the edge water’s edge. We avoided making them look like stairs. Instead, we wanted them to mimic visible rock layers that are the result of natural geological processes. The, at the end of the pool nearest the house, we placed a large flat stone to create a diving area, and we made a waterfall on either side of it by laying down stones in a manner that created varying speeds of water.

It took us almost a month to consciously and deliberately lay each stone by hand. While this may seem painstakingly detailed to some, the rewards were well worth the effort. At the end of the day, our natural swimming pool so closely resembled a jungle waterfall that it lacked almost all evidence of human conception or engineering.