Making a Splash: Swimming Pools Get Creative

Works of art don’t just hang on walls. Here’s some you can dive right into, writes Francesca Perry

“Gateway,” 2019 by artist Joana Vasconcelos at Jupiter Artland in Scotland. Photograph: Owen Humphreys, courtesy, Jupiter Artland

Whether indoors or outdoors, a swimming pool is one of the most requested features of a luxury home—particularly with the booming post-pandemic interest in wellness. It not only offers the opportunity to keep fit and relax, but is an ideal focal point for entertaining and socializing. Recent research shows it also commands a price premium when it comes to selling your property.

With all its importance then, it seems strange that so much contemporary design treats the pool as a simple blue rectangle. Recently, a range of artists and designers have been bringing fresh energy to pool design, infusing it with color, pattern and immersive scenography to create a showpiece that can enhance the architectural vision of a home. 

“It’s an unexpected piece of art,” says Portland-based designer Alex Proba, whose colorful creativity has been applied to multiple private pool projects. “Why just have a blank pool?”

Alex Proba’s “pool-as-artwork” at the Fernandez Residence in Miami. Photograph: Ori Harpaz

While Proba always dreamt of designing pools in her signature vibrant aesthetic, which blends bright hues with bold patterns, it wasn’t until 2019 when she was approached by a client to make it a reality. In that first project, Marrow House, just outside Palm Springs, California, Proba transformed the swimming pool of a mid-century desert modernist home into a joyful canvas of multicolored shapes, by painting directly on the concrete basin.

Inspired by the Palm Spring pool, more homeowners soon asked Proba for similar transformations and she was recently able to work on a newly built private residence in Miami, embedding the “pool-as-artwork” into the overall vision for the home. 

“The inside of the house is consciously designed to be very muted, so I think [the clients] thought it would be amazing to have the contrary in the garden,” Proba says. She worked with specialist manufacturer Ceramica Suro to create more than 8,000 bespoke ceramic tiles that, through shape and color, bring her sumptuous design to life. In general, Proba adds, it is better for resilience and durability to add designs to pools with tiling rather than waterproof paint. 

Felipe Pantone’s pool mosaic at a residence in Spain. Photograph: Image courtesy of Felipe Pantone Studio

Other artists and designers have also turned to tiles to add bursts of creativity to pools, making them into showstopping elements of a home or estate. 

Argentinian-Spanish artist Felipe Pantone used more than 130,000 ONIX glass tiles to create a pinwheel-like mosaic for an infinity pool at a minimalist coastal home in Spain. The effect, like much of Pantone’s work, is kaleidoscopic, though gently so: the shimmering colors are both subtle and captivating, adding excitement to the otherwise pared-back white exterior of the house. 

Elsewhere, Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos designed a pool for the Jupiter Artland estate in Scotland, a public sculpture garden on the grounds of a Jacobean manor house. Hand-painted and glazed ceramic tiles create a vision of swirling colorful lines within a splash-like silhouette.

Proba thinks a colorful pool can even work for those who are typically hesitant of vibrant shades. “It’s not in your bedroom,” she says—and that slight separation, allowing boldness into an outside space or dedicated pool room, can work well. Creativity doesn’t need to come from color alone either.

The ‘river’ pool at Al Suave House, El Salvador, by Cincopatasalgato and Pepe Cabrera Homes. Photograph: Topafila Studio

At Al Suave House, a beachfront property in El Salvador by architecture firm Cincopatasalgato and designers Pepe Cabrera Homes, the swimming pool takes the form of a winding “river,” dissecting the architecture in two. Visually running through the home towards the sea, this one-of-a-kind pool echoes the forms of nature, creating an energising swimming experience. 

A geometric pool by San Francisco-based landscape architecture firm Surfacedesign, meanwhile, brings dynamism to the garden of a Palm Springs home, its shard-like contours designed to reflect the surrounding jagged mountains, as well as the roofline of the house, which is designed by Mark W. Daniels, Architect. “Most of our private clients are serious art collectors, so we’re often asked to create pools that are more sculptural in form than traditional rectangular ones, which is always exciting for us,” says James A. Lord, partner and co-founder of Surfacedesign. 

The pool at Le Grand Mazarin in Paris by Martin Brudnizki Design Studio. Photograph: Vincent Leroux

When pools move indoors, the canvas for creativity can grow, particularly if designers harness the surrounding architecture to create scenes of artistry and intrigue. In Le Grand Mazarin, an elegant hotel project in Paris by Martin Brudnizki Design Studio, a barrel-vaulted pool room is topped with a mural of curling foliage painted by local artist Jacques Merle, while a bold striped mosaic on the pool floor below adds dynamism. 

And at a home in Gstaad, Switzerland, envisaged by creative director Nachson Mimran in collaboration with Burkinabé-German architect Diébédo Francis Kéré, the stunning indoor swimming pool is designed with a rippling silhouette, topped by a breathtaking ceiling of almost 10,000 undulating bamboo tubes.

The organic forms of a pool in Gstaad, Switzerland, conceived by Nachson Mimran and Diébédo Francis Kéré. Photograph: Cecil Mathieu, image courtesy of nachsonmimran.com”

Inspired by the crocodile caves of Madagascar, the indoor area was conceived “as more than a simple swimming pool,” says Mimran. “It was designed as an aquatic living room, a space for social interaction and meaningful exchange.” 

Creatively designed, then, a swimming pool can be more than a mere luxury amenity. It can become a source of inspiration and excitement—as well as a work of art in its own right.