_Pools with a view – the rise of rooftop swimming

by Joshua Sims 

Some say it’s property prices – why leave all that valuable real estate on your roof redundant? Others say it chimes with the growing interest in outdoor swimming; even if that outdoor is several storeys up, it’s an improvement on the often claustrophobic, chlorine-doused setting of most indoor pools.

It’s become the sort of luxury expected in any high-end hotel or residence now – as essential as a business centre. Whatever the reasons, developers are at the coalface of this new trend.

This is despite the complications that construction brings – structural engineers are getting smart with the extra stress all that water places on the building below and often set the pool on a platform, both to better distribute the weight and to prevent damage to the building should there be an overflow.

This problem is even driving some architectural innovation: the borrowing of lightweight composite materials from the aerospace industry to create one- piece shells for the pool, rather than the usual pannelled stainless steel.

^{Above: Four Seasons Shanghai, Pudong}

But that’s not the only hindrance – rooftop pools are hugely expensive to build; and they tend to be on the shallow side, rarely deeper than four foot. And yet not only are they the kind of space that allows their users to perhaps feel they have escaped the urban mania way below – and to bring people together in the kind of relaxation that arguably fosters some community – they’re also spectacular.

Take, for example, the pool at the Joule Hotel in Dallas, which juts out of the building’s side over the road several storeys below. Or, taking this idea a step on, the glass bottomed pool at the Holiday Inn Shanghai Pudong Kangqiao – from which swimmers can peer down 24 storeys between strokes. The Ritz-Carlton Hong Kong’s infinity pool, although enclosed, is the highest pool in the world (so far) at 118 floors up. 

No wonder residential residential building developers are taking the notion of the pool at the top to heart. You might expect it in a multi-million pound penthouse – such as the one in Monaco’s Tour Odeon Tower, with a giant circular infinity pool entered by slide from the level above.

But the Aquaria Grande twin towers under construction in Mumbai will have a balcony pool for each apartment. Swimming eye to eye with other tall buildings – or even snowy mountains – can be disarming but also great fun: in Shanghai’s Four Seasons pool you’re lit by the city’s glittering skyscrapers.

But other roof top pools diminish your disorientation: the Roof Garden at the Peninsula in Beverly Hills is surrounded by private cabanas that are more typically beach side than sky high.

The 38 private infinity pools at Bali’s Ubud Hanging Gardens are designed to give the impression of swimming through the treetops. And the InterContinental Hong Kong’s spa pools feel like extensions of the harbour over which they look.

^{Above: The Penthouse at Tour Odeon, Monaco. On sale through Knight Frank}

Indeed, it seems as though we may be approaching saturation point with rooftop pools. Whatever building architects devise, there always appears to be some way of putting a pool in.

Manhattan, for example, will soon see the completion of the American Copper Buildings; two curving, strikingly copper-clad towers, one with a seriously stomach-knotting rooftop infinity pool. But that’s not all.

The towers are linked by a 30-metre sky-bridge. Normally this would simply be there to allow residents to walk between the two related buildings. Naturally, in this instance, you’ll be able to swim between them too.

^{Above: Hanging Gardens of Bali}