The world!s best swimming pools

T

Whether formal or ! natural!, swimming pools have become integral to a garden!s design in recent times. Mark Griffiths celebrates the new pools you wouldn! t have to hide away

HERE used to be two statements that every garden designer dreaded hearing: ! We! re going to need plenty of space to kick a ball around! and

! We want the swimming pool near to the house! . The first remains irremediable, but the second has become a welcome chal- lenge, a positive pleasure. The days are past when a swimming pool meant insulting the garden with a Radox-coloured rectangle surrounded by bleach-singed turf.

120 Country Life, May 19, 2010 Nor do we adopt the old alternative

strategies any longer, which were to hide the pool behind high hedges, like a tennis court, or to doll it up with pillars and pavilions, like something from Tiberius! s villa. Far from shunning or disguising them, some of our best garden designers are reinventing pools and wanting to put them centre-stage before their clients even ask. We are in the midst of swimming-pool boom! one could almost call it a cult.

As you might expect, it began in places

where outdoor swimming is a perennially good idea. In California, it has long been understood that the pool should be a development of, and an ornament to, good modern garden design. And, in the present century, we welcome that most enigmatic and desirable feature, the infinity edge, where the water! s surface sits level with a precipitous wall and becomes a false horizon, meeting the sky or sea beyond.

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