When Laurie and Scott Booth got ready to have a swimming pool installed behind their house in South Barrington, they were sure of one thing: “We didn’t want some stark white, rectangular pool like you see at the park district,” Laurie says.
“We wanted something really cool, something we could enjoy looking at every day of the year,” she says, “because we knew that here in the Midwest you only have like a season-and-a-half when you can use the pool. If it’s an eyesore to look at the rest of the year, all winter we’d still have to look out at it.”
The pool they ultimately built has a waterfall that swimmers can either swim under or sit atop, three natural-looking rock formations jutting out of the water that can double as diving platforms, and a naturalistic curving shape that suggests a free-form pond.
Colorful, blooming perennials run right up to the sides of the pool deck, giving the pool a surrounded, tucked-away feeling. And the bottom and sides of the pool are black instead of the traditional white. “That really makes it look more like a lake than like a pool in the park district,” Booth says.
The Booths’ pool is a big step away from the old standard at-home pool, which was usually a big rectangle–or occasionally a kidney shape–whose hard edges set it apart from the rest of a back yard. But it’s nothing unusual; pool builders and others in the industry say the norm today is to build far more dramatic pools than in the past.
Huge, natural-stone outcroppings, vanishing-edge pools that seem to dissolve into the horizon, and sculptural spas spilling over into pools are among the touches that are becoming increasingly common as the swimming pool becomes one more part of the home that is designed for maximum visual pop.
“Nobody asks for just a swimming pool anymore,” says Pat Boilini, head of a Lake Bluff pool-building firm, The Boilini Co.
Boilini has installed everything from an indoor pool on the second floor of a Skokie home, to a vanishing-edge pool on a Glencoe bluff that appears to extend into Lake Michigan, to a fantasy pool that entirely surrounds and even flows through the inside of a Chicago client’s house in the Bahamas.
An ordinary pool could be had for as little as $20,000 these days. But waterfalls, fiber-optic lighting and other upgrades typically jack the price up to around $100,000, Boilini says.
What’s behind the trend? Industry people say there are several factors, including a robust economy that has put discretionary income in homeowners’ pockets, and advances in pool construction that make naturalistic curves no more expensive to build than a rectangle.
There’s also the vacation factor: “People go on these tropical vacations where all the hotels have elaborate pools with waterfalls and swim-up bars and curving slides, and they want to have that kind of thing at home. They’re basically building themselves a vacation pool,” says James Wilnau, the sales manager for Barrington Pools.
Elise Vachon, the editor of Swimming Pool/Spa Age, a trade magazine based in Atlanta, says the trend toward over-the-top pools is also driven in part by pool builders who set out five or so years ago to revive a sagging industry. “A few years ago this industry was in bad shape, and builders as a group decided to turn it around by building better quality, more interesting pools,” Vachon says.
The quality advancements have been largely on the technology side, with the development of filters, chemical dispensers and other equipment that are more automated and less time-consuming for the homeowner, Wilnau says.
Safety, too, has been upgraded with the automatic pool cover, a slide-over lid that is easy to operate and virtually impossible for children and uninvited guests to get around when it’s in place.
Fancy pools can be either formal or casual. For a Lake Forest house whose lines were somewhat traditional, Boilini installed a raised cube of a spa, out of which pours water that cascades over a broad, shallow staircase and into a grand rectilinear pool. For a contemporary home on five acres in St. Charles, he installed a more fluid arrangement of waterfalls, a stream and a loose-edged pool just 4 feet deep that wraps two sides of the house.
Sara Furlan designed the St. Charles pool and co-designed the Lake Forest pool with colleague Dennis Murphy. Both Furlan and Murphy are landscape architects with the Lake Bluff firm Mariani Landscape.
“Typically, the architecture of the house tells us the direction to go with the landscape, and the pool is a major part of the landscape,” Furlan says. “You don’t want to look at the house and the landscape as separate from each other, you want to marry them to each other. The pool has to fit in with what’s already there.”
While a pool builder can design the entire water complex, it’s probably best to start with a landscape architect, in order to get a fully integrated look with plantings, pool and house all working together. A landscape architect is schooled in fitting the plantings and other outdoor structures to the house and lot, and can make the pool a piece of the whole picture. “Any pool the landscape architect dreams up, we can build,” Boilini says.
That was the Booths’ experience. They started by telling Barrington Pools “we wanted it to be really cool, and they came back with something that was nice, but we wanted something more fun,” Laurie Booth recalls. They then went to Sebert Landscaping in Bartlett and worked with a landscape architect who “fit the pool into the yard a little better and got us this really cool look we wanted.”
The whole package feels more put-together, she says. Barrington Pools installed the pool.
One frequently requested amenity that Furlan says can be hard to accommodate on flat Midwestern terrain is the super-size waterfall. “To get that, you have to build up a hill and then cut into it,” she says, “and there are few ways to make that look natural.”
For the St. Charles project, the lot already had some slopes, and the space was so big that the needed height could be crafted without an awkward look. But in other locations, she says, “we might suggest a fountain or water jets that spray over the pool–something that gives you that great sound of water without looking wrong.” Looking wrong may be the worst offense a pool can commit, given its central position on all but the largest estate lots.
As Laurie Booth says, “you have to look at it even when you aren’t swimming, so it might as well look as good as you can make it.”
If you’re thinking of having a fantasy pool installed in your yard, in your first meeting with a builder you’ll learn not only how much you can do, but how much you can’t.
“For the first meeting, we always bring a print-out of what their municipality allows for pools,” says James Wilnau, the sales manager of Barrington Pools. “That way they don’t get their hopes up on something we’re not going to be allowed to do.”
If your pool builder does not provide such a print-out, contact your municipality for information on pool regulations. Safety rules don’t vary much from town to town, Wilnau says–a fence is always required, for example–but the allowable pool size for pools does. Lot size, setback from neighbors’ lots and other factors dictate the form a pool can take, and most of these are governed by local codes. Standards set by the National Swimming Pool Institute also rein in some ideas, but in the interest of safety.
