Here’s a truly glamorous idea for a pool. A sinking pool! The apparently permanent stone floor in this room literally slowly drops to reveal the pool underneath.
In the raised position, you can walk on the same surface radiantly warmed from beneath. And of course, having the swimming pool convert itself into a floor makes it child-friendly too: this is not a pool that a child can fall into.
Once it is sunken it looks like any other indoor pool – as permanent as you could possibly want.
You could design this so that it remains as just a shallow decorative pool when not in use, one that is only an inch or two deep.
But the best thing about this idea is that it would also make keeping the pool warm a cinch. The exposed surface of pools give off heat at a great rate and take a lot of energy to reheat. But this one is only exposed to heat evaporation when you swim in it. This could make this extremely glamorous design also a very climate-friendly one as well. That’s because the energy expended to keep pools toasty make your swimming pool the worst carbon hog: worse even than you driving that SUV.
Radiant floors or the use of thermal mass is climate-friendly design because of the slow release of warmth – reducing energy needs for heating.
The super-rich with luxury housing do the most harm to the planet with their luxury high energy use architecture. So, encouraging their architects to incorporate eco design ideas like thermal mass/radiant floors into luxury architecture is a way to reduce their normally VERY heavy carbon footprint.
But of course the energy consumption would depend on how much energy is expended to raise and lower the floor. Perhaps that can be engineered to be a clever energy efficient design… or perhaps not. It is designed in Belgium – if you want to ask and see, or make a suggestion on how that could be achieved.
