An infinity pool can be used to frame how your home is to be perceived from a pre-selected vantage point.
Our firm was recently commissioned to design a significant remodel for a residential client whose brief included, notably, an infinity pool.
An infinity pool can be a powerful element with which to both showcase a home and beautifully enhance the experience of life within the home. Here are five best practices we recommend when your design includes an infinity pool:
1. Think of the pool as framing a picture. 2. Locate the pool to enhance your key view. 3. Use the pool to conserve energy. 4. Consider it’s form and materials carefully. 5. Make the pool a practical asset.
Think of the Pool as Framing a Picture Utilize your infinity pool as part of your kit of parts to frame and enhance how your home will be perceived from a distance. For example, the pool will lend more grandeur if placed as part of the entry promenade as opposed to being placed in the back yard. Similarly, it will have an entirely different effect located on the sunny south side of the home as opposed to the shadier north side.
While it may or may not turn out to be practical to locate the pool on the entry side or even the sunny side of the home, the option should at least be identified and considered within the context of other factors informing its ultimate placement on the site.
An infinity pool can be a powerful tool to frame and enhance a primary view.
Locate The Pool To Enhance Your Key View An infinity pool can be a powerful tool to frame and enhance a primary view.
You must decide first which is the key view from the perspective of looking outward from the site. Some sites are fortunate to have several views from which to choose – if such is the case, it’s all the more important that you evaluate them carefully. List them, with the one most important to you at the top of the list, and secondary views farther down the list. The view at the top of the list is the one to be emphasized as your key view.
Next, choose which room or rooms are to be oriented towards your key view. Is it to be the living room, the dining room, the master bedroom, or all of the above?
Once these decisions are made it becomes a relatively simple matter to decide where within your key view shed the infinity pool is to be placed. Thinking of the pool as a vast horizontal mirror, its surface can powerfully reflect and magnify your key view.
Use The Pool To Conserve Energy An infinity pool can be a practical asset when it comes to conserving energy. As a reflective surface, if placed advantageously the pool can be used to direct additional solar energy in the form of sunlight, thereby reducing the home’s energy demand in terms of lighting. In hot climes or on hotter days in more temperate climates air cooled by the pool can be used for cross-ventilation as part of a strategy of passive solar cooling for the home.
The materials used to construct the pool and surrounding decks should complement those utilized in the home’s exterior.
Consider the Pool’s Form and Materials Carefully Your pool’s form and geometry will need to complement the style of the home itself. A rectilinear, orthogonal pool will always complement a home designed in the modern style – it may not necessarily enhance a home designed in, say, French Country style. A curvilinear pool will lend itself to some architectural styles and not to others. So too, the materials selected in the design of the pool will need to match or at least complement those selected for the exterior of the home itself.
Make the Pool a Practical Asset As a recreational feature, your infinity pool’s function is not simply to enhance your home aesthetically – it’s also your place for swimming! While sorting through all the other factors informing your pool’s design, its crucial not to loose track of what makes a good swimming pool.
Locating the pool for good solar access is essential – nobody wants to swim in a shaded pool! This means that the pool’s relationship to both nearby trees and the house itself need to be carefully considered: neither element should be permitted to cast a shadow on the pool while it’s in use.
For the sake of comfortable access it’s best to locate the pool closer to the home rather than farther away. This is actually an added advantage in terms of most of the best practices described earlier. A pool positioned closer to the home will serve better to capture and reflect distant views than one farther away, and a pool placed nearer the home will be much more effective in bouncing daylight into the interior than one farther away.
Finally in terms of practicality, the pool must lend itself to a strong sense of privacy if its usefulness is to be fully realized. Enclosing it to some degree with building elements, privacy fences or landscaping – placed carefully so as not to compromise the other best practices described earlier – will be critical to the design of the successful infinity pool.
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