Why designers are obsessed with colourful pools
-
Loading... - Luiz Almeida
- 20 Jun 2022
- 230 Views
- 0 Like
- 0 Comment
A high-flying cannonball isn’t the only way to make a splash with a pool. Although most of them look like little more than simple blue glistening rectangles, artists and designers have recently been reminding us that it doesn’t always have to be so. Treating the pool as a blank canvas, they are experimenting with color, pattern, form, and light to create places for an uncommonly refreshing dip.
At Jupiter Artland outside Edinburgh, artist Joana Vasconcelos conceived Gateway, a circular pool and free-form deck adorned with undulating ribbons of colors realized with 11,366 hand-painted tiles. At L’Arlatan Hotel in Arles, France, Jorge Pardo extended the same multi​colored, geometric tiles he used for indoor flooring out into the pool. For private collectors in Connecticut, James Turrell created Baker Pool, a truly immersive art installation lined with color-shifting lights.
But perhaps no one has recently done more to inspire people to reconsider what pools should look like than the multitalented designer and artist Alex Proba. “I think they are a missed opportunity in the design and architecture of houses,” she says. “No one really pays attention to their interiors.”
Proba started out by imagining otherworldly pools lined with vibrant, overlapping Matisse-cutout-like shapes and then posting digital renderings of her proposals on Instagram. Before long, real commissions flowed in, and she found herself coating pool plaster in Palm Springs with special underwater paint in custom hues. “I love canvases that aren’t canvas,” she says.
Designers are also increasingly using pools to make statements in hotels and private homes alike. “I wouldn’t leave a wall blank, so why would I leave a pool blank?” says Ken Fulk. “It’s about creating beautiful spaces where there’s also a sense of playfulness and whimsy.”
“I wouldn’t leave a wall blank, so why would I leave a pool blank?” —Ken Fulk
Fulk’s current projects include a pair of pools for a home in Mexico, where artists will paint the bottoms with murals—one with a Cocteau-inspired figure of a woman, the other with a more abstract pattern mimicking sound waves. And for his upcoming Harthan hotel in Austin, Fulk is designing a pool that will sprout mosaic-covered tentacles that curl up and out of the water to form built-in furniture and planters.
These pool provocateurs follow in the footsteps of earlier artists and designers who saw enormous opportunities in the watery voids. At the Villa El Martinete in Málaga, Spain, the flamenco dancer Antonio Ruiz Soler had an original sketch by his friend Pablo Picasso re-created in tile to finish the bottom of his pool.
Artist David Hockney is revered for not only painting pool-focused works on canvas but also painting directly on pools themselves, including his own kidney-shaped refuge.
The Italian architect Gio Ponti, who designed irregularly shaped pools filled with unexpected features for hotels like the Royal Continental in Naples, Italy, summed up his motivation like this: “I want swimming pools for nymphs.” Read More...
