Jeff and Fay Roberts
Fay and Jeff Roberts had inherited a 25-year-old swimming pool when they bought their house in Radlett. They and their two young boys used it for a couple of years but it was expensive to heat, the boiler kept breaking down, and then someone suggested they Google swimming ponds…
The pool was in an enclosed area of the garden surrounded by a fence and shrubs. We proposed an "external" pool conversion, i.e. keeping the swimming area largely as it is, and extending the shallow planting area outwards towards the edges.
The existing paving was taken out to create space for the planting area, and we also removed the existing steps (in the bulge on the right side of the photo below) to create space for the natural filtration area.
We lowered the existing pool walls by 30cm, and built a small dividing wall to create a filtration area in the space made by removing the old steps.
"A lot of people, when we told them what we are doing, thought we were going to ruin our garden!" says Fay. "Now people have come here and they can’t believe how fantastic it looks."
"They say it looks as if it’s been here for years," agrees Jeff. "It’s integrated very well with the area the swimming pool was in before."
"The water is lovely, really nice,” says Fay. “The children come and use it after school and I let them swim in it before they go to bed because then it’s like their bath, they don’t then need to shower off."
“The boys love the nature aspect too,” says Jeff, “and will spend almost as much time looking for bits of wildlife as in the pool.
“We've used it more than we used the swimming pool. Even when it’s not been fantastically sunny we’ve been in it a lot.”
