The garden house is to be made into a pool house and the existing conventional square pool has been entirely redesigned and reconstructed to create a fluid circulation with a more elegant and innovative contemporary design. The landscape design is to connect the swimming pool and pool house with the natural beauty of the surrounding country garden.
This large country house near Cirencester has an extensive garden area, and a garden house in a traditional Gloucestershire country vernacular with exterior walls of natural stone. The pool and pool house design had to work with these inherited features: the fixed external appearance and set structure of the building.
Made from mainly the material Solid Plastics, the interior of the pool house is one fluid shape with no seams. The design has used the potential of this strong and flexible material to its fullest, enabling unique double curved shapes, sculpting the features straight out of the walls. The pool is hung around the double curved sauna pod, with a long lap-pool extending across the length of the building and a play pool curving off to the side. The far end of the lap-pool is pushed back into an atmospheric area with lowered ceiling, and a projection wall. On the long side of the lap-pool there is to be a light feature sculpted out of Solid Plastics to filter in light, creating a calm, shimmering cave ambience.
Around the side of the sauna pod a stairway leads to the changing room, showers, steam room, WC and storage area. Sinks, walls and seating emerge and flow into each other in sweeping curves sculpted from the Solid Plastics, giving a feeling of one whole fluid shape.
The fun-pool area reaches outdoors to include a hotpot tub, next to an outdoor bar and hearth. A fully retractable glass wall will separate the outdoors hotpot from the play-pool and lap-pool inside. The outdoor terracing bleeds into the surrounding garden with stepping-stones leading further into the grass lawn.
Brief: The client had been recommended 4M Group to rethink an earlier design proposal. They wished a more innovative and fluid design for the swimming pool, the pool house and surrounding landscape.
