By KIMBERLY STEVENS The New York Times | August 26, 2007

Nicole Sassaman, a 36-year-old designer and property developer, devoted three years to building the swimming pool of her dreams at her home in the Hollywood Hills. An eight-metre expanse of glittering blue and green glass tile from Italy, the pool, completed last year, cantilevers out from a steep hillside and hugs the 5,500-square-foot house — once Greta Garbo’s — so

closely that the house appears to float on a sliver of blue. In the evening, the twinkling cityscape of Los Angeles is reflected in the water, which seems to drop off into the hills below.

"A pool should be more than a pool these days," Sassaman said. "If you’re going to build one you should really try to set a mood and create some drama. It’s important that the pool is in a league of its own."

Various pool builders and engineers Sassaman consulted told her that her site was far too steep for a pool, until David Tisherman, a luxury pool designer, agreed to build it. All the materials had to be carried onto the site by hand, and the project ended up costing about $500,000, she said. Still, she’s confident it was a wise investment. "It was what put the house in the over-the-top-category," she said, helping her to sell it in November for US$7.5 million. She estimates the pool added $1 million to the price tag.

Even as most residential property in America continues to lose value and the market for new pools stalls, the pool that’s more than a pool seems to be gaining ground. A recent survey by the Association of Pool and Spa Professionals showed that "high-end" pools starting at $75,000 (the average in-ground pool costs about $40,000) accounted for 40 per cent of the new pool market in 2006, up from 20 per cent three years before. Some of this increase may be due to homeowners like Sassaman, who see these pools as a way to ensure their homes’ places in the relatively stable "over-the-top" segment of the real estate market. But more than anything else, according to pool builders and designers, the drive toward the fabulous pool has been fed by a combination of people spending more of their time outside and a certain competitive acquisitiveness among their very rich clients.

"People now want to live in and around their pools," said Dick Covert, executive director of the Master Pools Guild, a network of high-end custom pool builders. "In a very short amount of time, the swimming pool has gone from a recreation centre to a complete environment." And that environment has become an exotic and inviting place, for those who can afford it, thanks to new design options and pool technologies: naturalistic or stylized lagoons, grottoes and moats; ledges and slides that have taken the place of the diving board; underwater sound systems; artificial water features that mimic the trickle or gush of natural ones; computer operated lighting; movie and television screens that rise out of the water.

"The high-end market seems to be exploding due to the influx of new technology," said Penny Johnson, the spokeswoman for the Association of Pool and Spa Professionals.

Irison Jones, the owner of Blak Ice Records, a hip-hop and R&B label in Los Angeles, was drawn to a lagoon design because he wanted the feeling of a "desert oasis" at his Lancaster, Calif., home, he said. He hired Marc Nagel, a designer for Alan Jackson Pools in Palmdale, Calif., to create a curvy-contoured pool amid artfully arranged rock formations, with a waterfall slide leading down from an upper-level hot tub.

Seven masonry crews of five to 10 men each carved boulders and cement into a naturalistic poolscape, with elaborate lighting and sound systems. Palm trees and tropical grasses were brought in to complete the picture.

Nagel also designed an in-pool table with a top just above the water level, with a submerged banquette.

The pool cost nearly $400,000, Jones said, and has been drawing the interest of neighbours, who peer over the property’s two-metre-high fence — but that doesn’t mean he’s a satisfied customer. "When the market gets a little better," he said, "I want to sell this house and build a much bigger and better pool."

"It’s like anything," he added. "Once you’ve created a cool space, you start to get more ideas. There are always new things hitting the market."

Nagel said that most of his clients are interested in being "the envy of all their friends." He is working on an all-marble pool in the shape of a dolphin — 20 metres from nose to tail — for the home of Ken and Georgia Chamitoff in Palmdale, Calif., which he estimates will cost nearly $300,000; the idea came from their eight-year-old daughter, Sophia. A hot tub will bubble by the dolphin’s head and a slide will drop down along the curve of its dorsal fin. "When you think you’ve heard it all, there’s always the client who comes up with something off the chart," Nagel said.

"We didn’t want the typical tropical lagoon that everyone else has in the backyard," Chamitoff explained. "I think it was important to Ken that Sophia could talk about having a dolphin pool with her friends at school."

Lou Downes, the owner of Downes Swimming Pool Co. in Arlington Heights, Ill., which specializes in high-end pools, said some of the requests he gets are too outrageous to be realistic. "Everyone has this James Bond fantasy of swimming from the outdoor pool through a tunnel into the indoor pool," he said. "We try to make everyone happy, but this just isn’t practical."

For those clients, he recommends separate indoor and outdoor pools, like the ones he’s working on for a couple outside Chicago, with a koi pond visually linking the outdoor and indoor pools. The outdoor pool, which will have fibre-optically lighted and computer synchronized water jets, will cost about $1 million, Downes said; the whole project will be almost $2 million. "For me, high-end goes far beyond the price tag," Downes said. "It’s more of a philosophy: It’s the blending of the finest materials and the most recent technology and a client who has a dream."
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