Pools That Look Like Water, Not Tile

Every pool showroom shows samples in a lightbox, held vertically, in a small square. Water is horizontal, deep, moving and lit from above. The relationship between the sample and the result is close to random.

What actually decides the colour

Depth. The same lining reads pale at 1.2 metres and saturated at 2.2. Any pool with a shallow end and a deep end will show two distinct colours, which is fine if you intended it and jarring if you did not.

The lining value, not its hue. Dark linings, charcoal, deep green, near black, produce reflective water that mirrors the sky and the surroundings. Pale linings, sand, ivory, pale grey, produce a Caribbean turquoise that comes from light bouncing off the bottom. These are two completely different objects.

The sky. A dark pool under a grey October sky is a pool of ink. A pale pool is turquoise in any weather. If your house is used year round in a variable climate, that matters more than the summer photograph.

Surroundings. A dark pool in a garden reflects planting and reads green. The same pool against pale stone and open sea reads blue-black.

Decide whether you want water you look at or water you look into. Everything else follows from that.

Marc Delaunay, pool designer, Antibes

The infinity edge, reconsidered

A vanishing edge works when there is a horizon behind it and a viewpoint above it. From a terrace looking out to sea, it is transcendent. From a garden at the same level, it is invisible, and you have paid for a second tank, a larger pump, a balance system and a permanent noise.

That noise deserves a paragraph. A vanishing edge is a waterfall running whenever the pump is on. Delightful for a week, then present in every conversation on the terrace and in the bedroom above. Specify a slow overflow, a wide weir and a variable-speed pump so the edge can be turned down without turning off the filtration.

Heating and the shoulder season

The value of a pool is measured in weeks of use. An unheated Mediterranean pool is comfortable from mid-June to mid-September, roughly thirteen weeks. A heat pump and a cover push that to late April and into October, roughly twenty-six.

The cover is doing more of that work than the heat pump: an uncovered pool loses the majority of its heat overnight to evaporation. Any heating strategy without a cover is a bill.

Running costs, honestly

A pool is a machine and it has a monthly bill. For a domestic pool of 40 square metres, expect the electricity for filtration to run between 250 and 600 euros a year depending on pump type, chemicals between 200 and 500, and water replacement for evaporation and backwash somewhere between 15 and 30 cubic metres a season.

Two decisions move those numbers more than anything else. A variable-speed pump, which uses a fraction of the energy of a single-speed unit because filtration at low flow for longer is both cheaper and better. And a cover, which cuts evaporation, chemical loss and heat loss all at once.

Salt chlorination is easier on skin and equipment than manual dosing and is not a chemical-free system: it makes chlorine from salt, which is the point. What it saves is handling and storage, which is worth having.

The plant room decision

Everybody designs the pool and nobody designs the room it needs. A filtration set for a domestic pool takes roughly two square metres, needs drainage, ventilation, power and about a metre of working space in front of it, and it makes noise.

Put it below the pool level if you can, because a pump that has to lift water works harder. Put it away from bedrooms, because filtration runs at night in most schedules. And make sure a person can change a filter cartridge without dismantling anything, which sounds obvious until you meet the pump squeezed into a hatch beneath the terrace steps.

The detail that separates good from ordinary

The coping. A pool edged with a bullnose tile lipped over the wall reads as a swimming facility. The same pool with a deck-level edge, or a coping in the same stone as the terrace with a 10 millimetre shadow gap and a slot drain, reads as water sitting in the landscape.

It costs perhaps three per cent of the pool budget and it is the difference between an object and a feature of the ground.