The swimming pool is back
Once a luxury, swimming pools are the next pandemic-era must-have
Over the past very strange year, GTA homeowners with the means to do so have been investing in all sorts of domestic comforts to make working from home and sheltering in place less trying. An expensive ergonomic office chair, for instance, doesn’t seem quite so de trop anymore. Nor do elaborate wine cellars, spa-like bathrooms or restaurant-calibre kitchens. Now that the weather is turning warmer, such “new reality” coping tools are inevitably extending al fresco: the latest former extravagance turned pandemicera must-have is an inground swimming pool, despite Ontario’s relatively short summers and the not-inconsiderable cost of installing one.
“The demand for pools has been crazy this year,” says Toronto landscape architect Sander Freedman, who describes current interest in enhancing outdoor spaces generally as “completely off the charts.” Typically, his small east-end studio, Sander Design, handles 20 or so landscape projects per season. This year, he’s juggling 30 to 40, many involving swimming pools.
“In previous years, only people with big yards and big money would typically ask for pools, but that has completely flipped,” he says. “When you can’t go to the gym and you can’t swim anywhere, it’s a lifestyle thing. They’re not strictly luxuries anymore.”
Even before the pandemic, Freedman notes, the skyrocketing prices for summer cottages, which precluded the need for a pool in the city, had prompted many homeowners to consider backyard swimming holes. The lockdowns forced by COVID-19, however, have sent this demand into overdrive, culminating in this season’s boom.
“The jump in volume (of requests for pools) has been extraordinary,” says Julio Andracchio, co-founder with Vince Camastra of Nuwave Group Inc., which both manufactures inground fibreglass pool moulds in South Carolina, through its Barrier Reef Pools division, and installs them in the GTA under the banner Simply Pools and Spas. “I have never seen anything like it.”
Like Freedman, Andracchio and Camastro ascribe the demand to a pandemic-driven re-evaluation by the newly housebound of how to use domestic space, both inside and outdoors. Also like Freedman, they caution that any GTA homeowner hoping to have a pool in the ground this summer is likely too late into the game.
“Any reputable company will be completely booked for this season,” says Camastro, noting that the surge in interest has prompted more than a few corner-cutting players to try to exploit the situation. “If you call an installer and they say you can have a pool in the ground this summer, it’s not a good thing. Run for the hills.”
In this respect, Michelle Donnelly’s timing was good: the Toronto creative director and her husband, artist Mark Puchala, had their inground saltwater plunge pool installed by Simply Pools more than six years ago. A nine-by-18-foot grey fibreglass model, it was put in over several weeks and takes up most of their compact west-end backyard, but it’s heated, handsomely designed and well incorporated. Donnelly doesn’t hesitate to describe it as a boon both before and during the pandemic.
“It’s therapeutic. It entertains my (12-year-old) son and his friends. And it blends in like a garden pond, so is lovely aesthetically,” she says.
Today, Donnelly and Puchala’s investment seems prescient, even if their purchase was motivated at the time by the desire for “an escape, but without the grind of driving to and maintaining a cottage.”
For their watery backyard retreat, the couple paid approximately $80,000 in material, excavation and landscaping costs, placing their small pool (“I’d add a built-in cover if we had to do it over again,” Donnelly says now) in the middle of the price range for an inground model.
Whether it’s poured concrete or prefab singlemoulded fibreglass, “you can’t touch a pool for less than $50,000,” Freedman says, noting that’s just for the hole in the ground.
These days, “the projects have grown quite a bit in size, in complexity and in expectations,” Andracchio says, referring to the water features, pergolas, firepits and other accoutrements that many homeowners want along with their inground pools. (According to Freedman, those resistance jets that simulate swimming against a current are especially popular nowadays, especially in smaller pools.)
Regardless of size or scope, all pool projects must, of course, adhere to certain parameters in Ontario. In Toronto, a swimming pool must be four feet away from a property line and be enclosed by a fence. Fortunately, says Freedman, pools and water features are counted as green space under city rules, making them feasible in even small backyards.
In terms of aesthetics, clean-lined, rectilinear shapes are trumping organic or kidney-shaped pools as a rule. On this score, Donnelly and Puchala’s elegant rectangular model was likewise ahead of the trend.
Those hoping to follow in their wake will just have to wait a little longer to get their own feet wet.
“People should be calling us right now to book for early next season,” says Camastro, who adds that installations often proceed swiftly given enough prep time.
“Typical projects,” he says, “take about two weeks (to execute), larger ones about four to six weeks.”