High-end design comes to the fish tank

Luxury aquariums for homes come with hefty price tag

Stuck at home during the pandemic, many Americans took in dogs or cats. Others took up a more elaborate pet hobby: luxury home aquariums. Something of a cross between home decor, entertainment, wildlife and pet shelter, these custom aquariums can weigh more than 75,000 pounds and cost as much as $750,000 at the top end.

“We’ve seen a tremendous boom in business,” said Nic Tiemens, of Infinity Aquarium Design in Los Angeles. He said demand has grown by about 400% since the start of the pandemic and is still going strong. Clients who may have long wanted to splurge on a home aquarium were stuck at home and were finally willing to take the plunge, he said.

In more typical times, he would install a high-end home aquarium every few months — now he’s doing multiple aquariums every month. The company is fully booked into the third quarter of 2022. Some of these aquariums rival installations at public aquariums in size and scale.

With many affluent Americans upsizing or relocating, aquarium designers say a good part of the demand is coming from repeat customers upgrading their sea life’s home as they upgrade the human home that surrounds it. “The aquariums are getting bigger and bigger, and the homes are getting more expensive,” said Gerry Calabrese, founder and president of SeaVisions, a 40-year-old South Florida company that installs aquariums worldwide for homes and businesses. He has built home tanks as large as 5,000 gallons. “We’ve never been busier,” he said.

Craig Atkins, a real estate developer in Newport Beach, California, hired Tiemens to design and install a 1,500-gallon tank in the living room of his house on Lido Isle, a human-made island off the

Newport Beach harbor. Atkins, an avid scuba and free diver who said he taught both his children to dive at age 5, wanted to bring the feeling of the sea into his home. “We’re fish geeks,” he said.

In his previous house, he had an 11-foot-long custom tank — the width of a supersize sectional couch. For his new house, he wanted to go larger. His saltwater tank is 15 feet wide — the length of the widest piece of seamless acrylic that was readily available. Tiemens said it’s big enough that the tank in the living room is visible from the length of a football field away through the home’s windowed glass exterior. “I like to say that it’s central to Newport Beach,” said Tiemens.

Retrofitting the tank into an existing home was a challenge. “I bought this house kind of on a whim because it’s on a corner lot on an island,” said Atkins. “Then it was like, ‘How do we fit a tank in?’ ” It wasn’t easy. Atkins said the crew slept at his house a couple nights, pulling all-nighters to get the tank installed on time.

First, a contractor had to install steel reinforcement into the floors to handle the 20,000 pounds of weight — water is heavy. Next, they retrofitted a basement space originally used as a wine closet into a filtration room with about a 300-gallon capacity. From there, saltwater gets filtered and pumped through six different pipelines built into the floors. Outside, there’s another 400-gallon tank for water changes. The setup ensures that the tank operates silently in the living room.

The tank is filled with synthetic coral and a colorful mix of tropical fish such as queen angels, parrotfish and cowfish.

“It’s like living art,” said Atkins, who said he enjoys feeding the fish himself. (They eat sushi-grade seaweed, shrimp and krill.) Atkins said he spent about $125,000 on the aquarium and accompanying equipment.

The initial installation and setup is only part of what aquarium owners can expect to pay. The fish themselves can cost hundreds of dollar each or more (at the top end, a masked angelfish can cost as much as $15,000). And high-end companies say customers can pay as much as $5,000 a month for weekly cleanings and maintenance. Tiemens, of Infinity, said a loose rule of thumb is to figure in $2 per gallon per month for maintenance, although it can vary widely based on the type of food and medication the fish might require. (Medication comes in liquid form and is generally used in quarantine tanks to prevent disease.)

Brad Barton, an emergency room doctor in Orange, Texas, put a custom-built tank in his new home, which was completed about six months ago. Barton said the house, which overlooks a large humanmade pond on the Texas and Louisiana border, was designed around two things: water views and his fish tank.

Barton said he has been a sea-life hobbyist since childhood. By the time he was in college, he had a 125-gallon tank, which he got for free after finding it discarded in a chemistry lab. When it came time to build his dream tank for his current house, he wanted something unique and custom-built to suit the space. He hired SeaVisions to design a 1,000-gallon, two-sided saltwater aquarium that would take the place of one of the archways in his living room.

Technological advances in recent years have made maintenance easier and more precise. Calabrese said he remotely monitors many clients’ aquariums and gets alerts when pH levels or temperatures are off.

The downside, said Calabrese, is that he’s always on. “They’ll send me an email on Saturday at 10 at night saying, ‘A fish got stuck behind a rock and he can’t get out!’,” he said. “People get panicked. But fish like to hide.”

A private freshwater aquarium designed by Infinity Aquarium Design, based in Los Angeles.