Jessica and Art Martinez knew when they moved to Van Nuys that one day they would have a pool. Architect Kenneth Lind had designed their 1953 ranch home to embrace the backyard of the nearly quarter-acre lot, but unlike many of the neighbors, previous owners never put in a pool. By the time the couple bought the house, what might once have been a lush rear garden was, to put it bluntly, a wreck. “It was dirt, dying plants, and a small collection of sad citrus trees competing for light underneath a giant walnut tree,” Jessica recalls. Adds Art, “And because we’d demoed the rotting skeleton of the old fence, we could see right into our neighbor’s kitchen. It was like, ‘Oh, John’s making dinner.’”

Jessica, who teaches gender and women’s studies, and Art, a podcaster, had hired designer Jared Frank to restore and update the house with an eye to its history and had happily settled in with their dog, Mabel. But every day, the joyless specter of the backyard was visible through the living room’s glass sliders.

About three weeks after they moved in, Art decided it was time to launch phase two of the property’s transformation: adding a pool. When they called Frank to see if he could recommend someone for the job, he told them he’d love to do it. “We’d developed such trust, and I’d always wanted to design a pool,” Frank says.

“My job was not just to wow their guests but to give Jessica and Art a space that they will experience every day.”
—Jared Frank, Designer

Taking his cue from the house and the existing circular concrete pad off the living room, he designed a saltwater pool “unbound by convention,” he says. “Instead of a rectangle or an amoeba shape, I mimicked the chamfered angle of the house.” On the pool deck, scored lines radiate off the circular baja shelf, while orange penny tiles delineate the pool steps and the water’s edge. Orange also makes an appearance in artist Jessalyn Brooks’s vibrant poolside mural adorning an existing cinder block wall. Frank designed a new fence, and he brought on garden designer and horticulturist Roy Altaras to transform the once-barren landscape into a drought-tolerant haven with native dune grass and succulents.

“So much of Jess and Art’s house is about movement and a sense of play,” Frank says. “The pool functions like a great sofa: It’s a place to move your body in different ways.” The couple agrees. “It’s a very indoor-outdoor life that we have here,” says Jessica. “I’m in the pool almost every day.”

Project Credits:

Landscape Design: Jared Frank Studio

Garden Design: Roy Altaras

Builders: Blue Pacific Contractors

Mural: Jessalyn Brooks

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