Natural Beauty

Consider an environmentally responsible pool for your outdoor living design.

- Alexandra Pecci

Imagine a landscape as serene, peaceful, and natural as the swimming holes you grew up with, sites of endless summer afternoons and carefree dips in the cool water. Now, imagine such a space within your own backyard, built to your personal specifications and complete with the most desirable pool features—including lighting, remote automation, and vanishing edges—that homeowners have come to expect from their outdoor living space. Now, also imagine the added bonus of that swimming space being completely without chemicals.

That’s what pool owners get with natural pools, which clean the swimming water with materials from nature instead of using chlorine or saltwater.

“It’s a type of system that uses a biological filtration process to clean the water. It’s completely chemical free. We’re mimicking the high mountain lake,” says Tristan Fields, COO of BIOTOP Natural Pools.

Hugely popular in Europe, where they were first developed, natural pools are slowly gaining recognition in the United States as people become more health and environmentally conscious. With that in mind, people are turning to natural pools for many reasons, from rejecting the use of chemicals for their own health, to wanting to have a pool that’s more sustainable and eco-friendly.

Natural pools are “inherently compatible with how Mother Nature clarifies and purifies water,” says James Robyn, president and CEO of BioNova Natural Pools.

Plus, natural pools eliminate the need to support the processing, packaging, and transporting of packaged chemicals.

“All of that energy and all of that carbon footprint is completely mitigated with a natural swimming pool,” he says. “It is sustainable.”