A Bigger Splash

These days, having a pool should be as much about artful personal expression as keeping cool.

- By Tim McKeough

A high-flying cannonball isn't the only way to make a splash with a pool. Although most of them look like little more than simple blue glistening rectangles, artists and designers have recently been reminding us that it doesn't always have to be so. Treating the pool as a blank canvas, they are experimenting with color, pattern, form, and light to create places for an uncommonly refreshing dip.

At Jupiter Artland outside Edinburgh, artist Joana Vasconcelos conceived Gateway, a circular pool and freeform deck adorned with undulating ribbons of colors realized with 11,366 hand-painted tiles. At L'Arlatan Hotel in Arles, France, Jorge Pardo extended the same multicolored, geometric tiles he used for indoor flooring out into the pool. For private collectors in Connecticut, James Turrell created Baker Pool, a truly immersive art installation lined with color-shifting lights.

But perhaps no one has recently done more to inspire people to reconsider what pools should look like than the multitalented designer and artist Alex Proba. I think they are a missed opportunity in the design and architecture of houses, she says. No one really pays attention to their interiors.

Proba started out by imagining otherworldly pools lined with vibrant, overlapping Matisse-cutout-like shapes and then posting digital renderings of her proposals on Instagram. Before long, real commissions flowed in, and she found herself coating pool plaster in Palm Springs with special underwater paint in custom hues. I love canvases that aren't canvas, she says.