Somewhere between the stock tank trend and that first pandemic summer, a pool started to look like a reasonable small-scale investment, even for those who rented in places with barely a sliver of a season: "If you look at Google Maps, you’d really be surprised," said one pool-curious New York City friend recently as she counted blue ovals in apartment building backyards.

A pool is a respite from increasingly sweltering summers, a DIY status symbol, and a killer party trick: I still covet the summer over a decade ago when a friend sublet a place in Bushwick that inexplicably included a suburban-sized one on what looked to be an abandoned parking lot. The best way to dive in, we found, was through a small window near his kitchen sink—a ritual we performed nightly coming home from a long night out.

Dwell spoke to some such pool owners, and as one told us, the pool is the ultimate DIY project: No matter the size of the space or your budget, the basic materials are widely available and there is no shortage of YouTube tutorials explaining exactly what to do.

Taylor Dow, Brooklyn

For Taylor Dow, getting a pool was a gradual process that also happened to be the realization of a long-term dream. When he lived on the top floor of his building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the early 2000s, he’d look down at a neighbor’s aboveground situation and vow to have something similar of his own one day. (To add insult to injury, the neighbor appeared to take a dip only once or twice a year.) In 2012, Taylor got the chance to move to the garden level of the same building and take over the yard. At that time, he says, it was just a patch of dirt. Over the next decade, that would change.

First, as a joke, a friend brought an adult-size inflatable pool to Taylor’s birthday party one year: “It lasted about six hours before we realized it wasn’t a real thing,” he says. He endeavored to find himself something that would last a bit longer, which is how he found a nearby company specializing in above-ground pools; his main request was that it use saltwater to reduce the number of chemicals he and his friends would have to endure.

Taylor is a co-owner of the campy Brooklyn dives The Commodore and The Drift. He says he likes to “embrace the idea of taking you somewhere else” with his businesses; that attitude extends to his rental, which he considers a safe haven in a corner of the city that’s been constantly under construction for at least the last 20 years. His place, by design, doesn’t really feel like New York. And he’s lucky: His landlord, so far, allows it.

The pool has inspired a few adjacent projects. First there was the structure itself, then the decking and landscaping to complement it. Last summer, Taylor added more decking still to create a clean path straight from the kitchen to the water. Naturally there’s also a billiards table downstairs.

A growing number of small pool owners have, like Taylor, chosen saline over chlorine. The upkeep for a saltwater pool, he says, is minimal, and he’d recommend it unequivocally. He has a pool guy who specializes in aboveground setups like these and travels from the Midwest to Brooklyn every summer, installing and maintaining city dwellers’ oases before going back home to “chill,” Taylor says, for the rest of the year. Taylor says he’s often one of the first and last stops for this particular pool guy, who will open this Williamsburg haven in the middle of May and keep it functional as late as November. Even if it’s too cold to go for a swim, Taylor enjoys being able to gaze out at the water.

“It’s my little escape,” he says. “I don’t have to go anywhere during the summer.” But if you find yourself in possession of a pool, he notes, you should definitely expect to have friends of friends suddenly reaching out: “People have certainly, like, caught on through the years.” Taylor is canny about how he maintains a healthy boundary around his pool without being rude. “I’m not mad,” he says of all his new summertime acquaintances. “I’d be doing the same thing.”

Abigail Lloyd & Bell Kauffman, Hudson, New York

When Abigail Lloyd and Bell Kauffman purchased their definitive fixer-upper of a home in January 2020, they planned to renovate it slowly, traveling from Brooklyn when time allowed. But by the middle of March they were living in the house while they worked on it, and it was time to deal with the cement-lined pit in the backyard, which was filled with more than a foot of water and debris. Also, there was a dead possum inside.

The couple, who jointly run the metal-working firm Hedron Studio out of their converted garage in upstate New York, say their business is based on manipulating available materials to fit their needs. So the pit, disgusting as it was, offered an opportunity. They considered turning it into a sandbox or a flower bed, but Bell convinced Abigail a pool was a worth-while project—Bell had a theory it might have been a koi pond or a splash pool for the kids who’d lived in the house a generation before. Plus, it was nearly impossible to find a stock tank during the pool boom of that prevaccine summer, and a water feature was starting to seem like a very good idea.

The pair fished out the possum (it was “still bleeding,” according to Bell), sanded down the cement, resealed the pit with pool paint, and purchased online an Intex filter commonly used in stock tanks. When you work with existing structures, says Abigail, “some decisions aren’t yours. But they end up being awesome.” The saltwater splash pool overlooking a pond has become one of the best decisions they’ve made, even if it was mostly inadvertent. It certainly helps when they need to escape the sweltering heat after a day spent welding or hauling miscellaneous debris out of the house.

During the summer of 2020, Abigail and Bell estimate, they had 30-odd guests come to their new, ramshackle home, most up from New York City. The pool was an invaluable resource and a way to see friends in a terrifying time. “You sit with a drink. You chat. It’s not swimming, you know? It’s social,” Abigail says. One experience they’ll never try again, though: putting their partially paralyzed dog, Cedar, in there for her physical therapy.

“Some decisions aren’t yours. But they end up being awesome.”
— Abigail Lloyd, resident

“It’s the quintessential DIY project,” says Bell, who spent an inordinate amount of time researching the sorts of filtration systems that might be appropriate for their small, accidental pool. “It involves a good amount of YouTube research, but the materials are very widely available.” And, Bell adds, pretty cheap.

But it’s not as if the derelict pit was the only reason the pair decided to rebuild a backyard pool: There’s just something so opulent about sliding into water on a hot day. Before the couple moved into their ongoing project of a home, Abigail would put a tarp in the bed of her truck and fill it with a hose to escape the hot New York City summers. “That’s how committed to the pool life we are,” she says.

Eric Baldus, Minneapolis

Minneapolis, a city with temperatures that regularly dip below zero, may not be the most obvious location for a plunge pool in a backyard. But contractors tend to have a vision of their ideal house, and Eric Baldus’s had always included a pool. Frequently coming home exhausted and sweaty after working all day on someone else’s vanity project, he wanted some-where of his own to cool off.

So when the landscape designer bought a 126-year-old Victorian in the northeast part of the city around 2004, the backyard was the thing he started work on right away. “And of course, 19 years later, I’m still working on it,” he says. “I’m an indentured servant to my own home.”

Eric’s 16-foot-long freshwater pool, the centerpiece of an expansive patio with an outdoor kitchen and a pizza oven, is for dunking. And it’s “technically a pond.” Pools are regulated differently by the city, and for a while, visitors to the house would share the recreational water feature with various species of fish.

“Traditional pools dominate yards,” Eric says. “It’s just not great to look at.” He wanted to design something that his two daughters could splash around in but that wouldn’t overpower the landscape with that particular teal chlorinated water tends to have. What he ended up with was something between a reflecting pool and what was likely the smallest fish-stocked pond in the history of the state.

Eric was on a pretty tight budget for someone looking to break ground. He borrowed a mini-excavator from another job to dig a hole in his backyard, then built a wooden foundation much like one you’d see underneath a house. The wood is kept separate from the water by layers of crushed clear rock and synthetic rubber roofing membrane, a material Eric often uses on the job; a UV filter and a sediment filter keep the water clean.

If there is one piece of advice he would give to prospective freshwater pool owners, it’s to “skip the fish, enjoy the life.” For the first few years of the pool’s operation, Eric stocked it with koi (and, once, trout). It seemed like a good idea at the time. But keeping fish alive through the Minnesota winter is hard work: “I’m a terrible koi owner,” he says.

A few years back, having given up on the dream of a combination fishery and recreational pool, he decided to end the experiment: He stripped down, hopped in the pool with a net, and enjoyed several fish dinners in a row. (Originally, he’d attempted to catch the fish with just a line, but they “caught on to me,” he says. In a small space, trout can be pretty smart.)

The upkeep is easier now. Plus, it’s kinder to visitors looking to cool off during the pool season, which in Minneapolis lasts only about three months: “People got a little freaked out by fish in there,” Eric says. The current iteration of the pool is much easier to explain on Airbnb.

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