This is the pool house that’s got it all: entertainment, dining table, bar counter, storage space, showers, and restroom. The kitchen boasts a wine conditioner, beer taps, warming drawers, a gas grill and lots of storage. There’s radiant heating for cold nights and a ceiling fan for warm days. Not to mention a great view of the pool.
The owner loves outdoor living. He also likes watching television, fine dining and entertaining. This lets him do it all without trips to the house. There’s even a storage room for cooking equipment and an additional refrigerator for storage.
Note all that counter space! It’s really important to have lots of horizontal space where food can be prepped, set out and presented when there’s a large event – especially if you don’t want to take away sitting areas for people sitting at the bar (although for large parties the bar becomes a serving area and rental tables take over the function of places to eat. You can only accommodate so many people with a simple bar, after all. It does work well as a serving area, since guests can fill their plates from both sides.
The walk-in shower hides behind a curved screen wall equipped with hangers for towels. It’s next to the restroom – easily accessible from both the pool and pool house.
Indirect LED lighting makes the structure glow, complimenting up-lights on the trees and contrasting with the pool’s cool blue/green/violet lights.
The slope was mostly left alone, with native and Mediterranean plants for accents – and to minimize water use in the landscape. The sitting area lawn is synthetic, and uses no water except for removing dust before use.
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Raising the outdoor room above the pool deck let us do some interesting things with views: it’s not only more visible from the pool area, but we could take advantage of the elevation difference to swoop out over the hill and into the view shed. Views are down to the pool making more of the pool visible as a bonus.
As far as entertainment space goes, this room was designed to host large parties. There is ample counter space, two bars accessible from both sides for serving. Cold and warm storage areas – including a beer keg refrigerator – support the large gas grill. Overhead cabinets, combined with an enclosed storage room with refrigerator make this a mostly autonomous space, although the home’s kitchen is used for large events.
The neighbor’s property is at a higher elevation than the pool house, so although it looks high from its own property, it will be mostly hidden by evergreen shrubs when viewed from next door. The roof is earth-toned metal, further blending it into the surrounding landscape.
We left the area downslope from the back yard mostly natural, giving a grove of large native oaks a chance to flourish. There are accents of low-water native and Mediterranean plants for added interest, but most vegetation is low to preserve a magnificent view.
This was our first in person view of the completed landscape. We’d visited it virtually many times on the computer, but that’s not the same as actually being there, strolling around with an appetizer in your hand.
The biggest difference was that the pool was redesigned from our drawings by the pool contractor, sharing the zero edge design but changing the shape, spa and waterfalls. Our initial design had a sloping beach entry, replaced with extensive warming shelves. Both designs featured the pool as a central point of the garden, offset by the pool house. We opted away from a vanishing edge pool where the water spills off the edge on the view side because we wanted people to be able to circulate all around the pool at the same level, making it the center of the back yard. Besides, a zero edge pool looks dramatic from any angle, in this case mirroring the pool house, sky and surrounding oaks.
Building something like this requires a good design team. After our initial design, it required an engineer for structural details and calculations, an experienced general contractor and subs to complete their shop drawings and an expert pool builder familiar with zero edge pools.
Strolling through the completed project was a bit surreal, since we’d modeled the site on the computer and had virtually walked through it countless times. Although computer modeling results in a better, more complete analysis it also takes away a bit of the excitement of viewing a project in person for the first time. Now that software developers are moving toward augmented reality, where you view the “completed” project through the screen of an iPad on site, design communication will become even more technology driven.