Architect William Smalley once owned a print by the architectural photographer Julius Shulman, famed for his image of the iconic Stahl House in Los Angeles and for capturing Frank Lloyd Wright and Richard Neutra’s mid-century masterpieces across America. It depicts a couple by a swimming pool; behind them stands a sleek modernist structure with a huge pine tree growing through the roof.
There’s something casually glamorous about the woman in her black strapless bathing suit, holding a drink, a blue towel puddled at her feet, and the man lounging on a low seat, chic in red polo and chinos. Sunlight casts bold shadows on the curved wall of a chimney in the background. It’s a scene of sunny mid-century American optimism; naive perhaps, but compelling nonetheless.
That was the mood William wanted to capture when he was asked by homeowners Paul and Jude to build them a poolhouse at the bottom of their garden. William had previously restored what was meant to be the couple’s ‘forever home’, when Paul called and said: ‘You’re not going to believe this, but we’re buying this tired 1958 house in south-west London.’
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It was part of a Span Development – the company led by British architect Eric Lyons that built estates that are highly sought after today. Once the property had been restored and extended, William and his clients turned their attention outside. ‘Somewhere along the way, the former owners bought the end of the neighbour’s garden and put a pool in,’ he explains.
The years had not been kind to this exotic addition; at one point, a ‘horrid plastic enclosure’ was added, then the concrete cracked, so the pool leaked and filled with algae. ‘Paul used to go down there and shudder,’ he recalls, ‘but they thought they might as well do something with it.’
Plans to keep the indoor concept were shelved, as the energy required to dehumidify the air would be more than it takes to heat an outdoor pool. The construction shrank dramatically ‘and it’s much nicer for it’, he notes. ‘As the pavilion got smaller, it got lighter, friendlier and happier.’
William wanted the poolhouse, which contains two changing rooms and a lavatory, to blend seamlessly with the greenery, so he designed curved walls formed from rubble-like stones to echo a low wall on the terrace and the monumental chimney in the house itself. A gap between the walls leads to a lobby, where a skylight casts a circle of sunlight into the space below.
The garden faces ‘west-ish’, so the wall catches the sun throughout the day, while the flat rectangular roof provides shade. Because the building isn’t a cube, the eye doesn’t discern its extremities, which disappear into the planting, while the pool is hidden around the corner. ‘The idea was that you wouldn’t read the boundaries of the space,’ says William. ‘From the house, you don’t know where the edge of the garden is. It’s completely idyllic, and yet there are planes flying over.’
For cost reasons, the pool was going to have a standard plastic liner, but when the pandemic saw delivery times stretch from six weeks to six months, meaning Paul, Jude and their children – Ben, Eliza and Rosa – would miss a summer’s swimming, they found an alternative. Paul’s research uncovered a distinctive render that reminded William of a neighbour’s concrete pool that he swam in when he was growing up. ‘It was amazing,’ he recalls. ‘You’re very aware of it as a body of water and you can see the bottom of it.’
An outdoor pool in England feels unexpected and luxurious. An extravagance, perhaps, but in this case, the clean lines and refined finish give the design an elegant restraint. ‘It’s quiet and modest, but also so glamorous at the same time. They didn’t want the pool to be a big thing,’ observes William. Still, he had a specific vision for his clients: ‘When we were planning, I said, “Jude, I want you to be down there sipping a gin and tonic at 11 o’clock with your girlfriends in bathing costumes and turbans!”’ he recalls, laughing.
‘There was a spirit of optimism with modernism that has gone now; the house and the poolhouse tried to hold on to that.’ And what happened to that Shulman print? ‘It never really found a home in my house, so I sold it to Paul and Jude.’ williamsmalley.com
