Photos by David Glomb, D. Tisherman, and B. Segal
From Here to Infinity
July 1, 2002
If you want to do serious laps, you go to your health club. That’s where you need the discipline of an Olympic-size pool that has straight lanes with lines drawn down the middle. That is a look you emphatically do not want to duplicate at home.
In your own aquatic Eden, you want to wade in the beach entry, lounge on shallow shelves, swim up to the bar, hurtle down a water slide, hide in a grotto and frolic under a waterfall.
Pools rarely look like body parts anymore—no kidney or heart shapes. They look more like lagoons or rock quarries, with vanishing-edge special effects. We present three breathtaking pools that offer different looks and different moods but with the same result—each provides a stunning waterscape for your estate.
The Pool As Rock Quarry
The Reserve in Palm Desert, Calif., has strict guidelines for building the deluxe vacation estates that are owned by the likes of Bill Gates. It also has strict guidelines for landscaping. The Reserve is one of the most expensive new gated communities in the Coachella Valley and it is one of the few that has not hauled in palm trees and petunias for landscaping. Instead, the mandate is: If it doesn’t grow naturally in the canyon, it can’t be planted.
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When Wayne Williamson of Insight West took on the task of designing a house and pool at the same time, he kept the landscape as indigenous as possible and planted native grasses and paloverde trees. The project (preceding pages) allowed him a continuity of materials: There is a seamless flow of Indian slate floors from the home’s interiors out to the pool. He sited the 10-by-30-foot pool at the edge of the property, which abuts the golf course and overlooks the Santa Rosa Mountains. He used the elevation of the neighboring lot as the sidewall and stacked slate edged with quartzite to resemble a rock quarry. The pool was lined with Pebbletech, which “smears pebbles on like icing to give a smooth but very natural surface,” explains Williamson. Cavities were dug into the sidewall to act as caves, and shelves were installed so that the residents can sit under the waterfall formed by the waterspouts. Everything was meant to appear as natural as possible. Williamson’s one major engineering challenge was reducing the noise of the waterfall. His solution was to reduce the motors that drive the pump from 5 hp to 2 hp. Now all reigns serene in the canyon.
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