Troubled waters: what is the future of the swimming pool?

In 1988, the artist David Hockney painted the bottom of the empty pool at the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel with a pattern of long, blue curves. Beneath the water, they accentuate the pool’s ripples in shimmering layers. His act of art was so popular that legislators wrote an exception into state law to preserve it, as undecorated swimming pool bottoms were mandated for safety.

Today, it’s more common to see people lounging in the sought-after chaises around the Hockney pool — and its bar — than swimming in it; it seems more for being seen than seeing. So what is the pool for — swimming, art or the vision of leisure it conjures? 

For most of the 20th century, the gently lapping water of the backyard swimming pool was the soundtrack of the California dream. The water reflected sparkling sunshine, bountiful resources and a taming of nature to human whims. California’s temperate climate and economic booms spurred its crop of pools, which have morphed in shape alongside technological advances and their evolving uses.

But the pool has reshaped culture, just as it has been shaped by culture. Today, in the era of climate change, the status symbol has shifted: the private swimming pool and its indulgent use of water have become part of the battles over ever-more-limited resources. 

In 1924, the Los Angeles Times trumpeted that the stars weren’t just like us: “They Swim in Their Own Backyards”, said the headline, in pools beyond the reach of the ordinary citizen. As the film industry flourished, extravagant private pools provided the backdrop for California’s growing celebrity culture. The architect Julia Morgan designed a tiled pool for actress Marion Davies’ beachfront mansion with a Venetian bridge arcing over it, and even grander pools at the famed San Simeon retreat of Davies’ lover, William Randolph Hearst. Photos and reports of celebrities cavorting in these baroque creations added to their aspirational glamour. 

Though status symbols on the surface, pools also had darker depths. In the film noir Sunset Boulevard (1950), the pool of the faded star Norma Desmond is empty — save for rats — when ambitious anti-hero Joe Gillis first stumbles on to her estate. Gillis narrates his thwarted envy over the dramatic opening scenes of his own dead body floating in the pool: “The poor dope. He always wanted a pool. Well, in the end, he got himself a pool — only the price turned out to be a little high.”

The price of a pool (if not of social ambition) fell in the economic boom that followed the second world war, making them more accessible to America’s middle classes. They were soon part of the fabric of the suburban grids that were formed to meet postwar housing demand. According to contemporary magazine reports, the approximately 10,000 pools in the US at the start of the 1950s had burgeoned to 175,000 by 1959. At the midpoint of this proliferation, half of all new pools were being built in California.

Esther Williams, who swam elaborate routines in films as “Hollywood’s mermaid”, lent her fame to a line of customisable pools that brought the pool’s glamour to a consumer audience. “It is apparent that the home swimming pool is rapidly becoming a normal and accepted part of the American way of life”, a 1958 ad for her pools declared.

But the rise of the private pool left many out, and public pools suffered. In the 1920s, Los Angeles’ segregated pools were only open to Black patrons on the day before cleaning. When the city integrated them in 1931, many white Americans built or sought private pools rather than integrate. This recurred across the US, which today has more than 10mn private pools to roughly 309,000 public ones. Restricted by class and race, the private pool became part of the individualist American dream. 

Away from home, semi-public pools at hotels and motels became a crucial travel amenity. The very first “motor hotel,” the Motel Inn, opened in San Luis Obispo in 1925 to provide a convenient, roadside rest stop for motorists on the then two-day journey to the Bay Area. As car travel and the federal highway system took off, motels sprang up along popular road trip paths such as Route 66’s stretch from Chicago to Los Angeles, often adding pools to attract customers.

Though California boasts miles of beaches, the ocean is too overwhelming; the pool is water claimed, cleaned and domesticated

In a 1972 short story by John Updike, the kids in a vacationing family begin their list of requirements for a motel with “a pool (essential)”. The motel and its pool became part of the imagery of the American road trip — and then, as the interstates began bypassing old highways, entangled with its seedy, rundown side.

Even the home pool could be disillusioning, with suburban malaise lurking in the deep end. In John Cheever’s unnerving short story The Swimmer (1964), made into a 1968 film with Burt Lancaster, a man grows chillingly isolated during his attempt to swim home through the chain of pools in his suburban town. The pool in The Graduate (1967) witnessed its protagonist’s disaffection with life after university. 

Off-screen, photographers such as Julius Shulman immortalised the pool’s evolving domestic forms in modern architecture, including his 1947 photograph of a Richard Neutra house in Palm Springs. Shulman’s photographs projected Modernism’s clean, minimalist sensibility, uninterrupted by human ripples or splashes. 

By contrast, Bob Mizer’s homoerotic “beefcake” photography celebrated the male body around bodies of water, despite the US ban on male nudity in printed materials (still in place at the beginning of the 1960s). Models often posed at Mizer’s home pool to evade the era’s anti-gay discrimination. Hockney’s paintings rendered pools in bright, blocky colours as spaces of desire and freedom. More recently, Hockney’s “A Bigger Splash” (1967) was answered by Jay Lynn Gomez’s 2013 painting “No Splash”, which centres on the often-erased figures of the immigrant labourers who keep the pool in its pristine condition.

In countless films, too, sex and social stratification have played out in the pool, including the sprawling, 1970s party scene of Boogie Nights (1997). Amid the sexual revolution and advances in gay rights, the pool provided a space to explore and reveal the body — albeit still favouring certain kinds of bodies. 

A body of water has its own allure. The approach to the pool and landscaping of the Donnell Garden, set into Sonoma’s rolling hills in Northern California, “is a great seduction”, says Charles A Birnbaum, president and CEO of The Cultural Landscape Foundation. Built in 1948, the kidney-shaped pool Thomas Church designed soon became the epitome of the backyard pool and outdoor living. Its distinctive, flowing spaces were popularised on the cover of House Beautiful magazine in 1951. 

The Donnell was not the first biomorphic pool — Church’s design may have been inspired by Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, and other idiosyncratic designs predate it. In the 1920s, Russian actress Alla Nazimova’s organically shaped pool was said to have been modelled on the Black Sea. But the Donnell pool “was one of those landscape features that broke through and became most definitely ubiquitous in the California landscape, but also in Modernism and in Googie architecture”, Birnbaum explains.

The popularity of interiors magazines in which it frequently appeared, Church’s following and the pool’s increased affordability all helped spread the design among a mass audience.

“The Donnell Garden became an iconic symbol of a very organic and free-flowing and carefree sense of the way in which one could live and move through space,” Birnbaum says. “It’s ground zero for the modern garden.” 

The Donnell pool’s free-form shape also inspired the genesis of skateboard culture in Southern California. After pools were drained during the severe droughts of the 1970s, a group of young surfers-turned-skateboarders, called the Zephyr or Z-boys, began to seek out pools’ curved basins to evolve the sport from flat streets to vertical skating.

Photographers such as Craig Stecyk and Jim Goodrich documented the birth of a new sport in law and gravity-defying feats. The pool was now a site of social change, bringing with it new kinds of bravado, identity and rebellion. Its designs moulded the ramps and curves of contemporary skate parks and the intensity of the action-sport X Games.

It’s not the pool itself so much as the mirage of water that shapes the California dream. Though California boasts miles of beaches, the ocean is too overwhelming; the pool is water claimed, cleaned and domesticated. Joan Didion wrote of the western pool as “a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable”. And control of water is one of the most contentious issues in the state. 

California is not currently in drought conditions, thanks to recent heavy rainfall and water restrictions, which include limiting lawn watering to certain times of day. However, 30 per cent of its groundwater supply is below normal levels, which means it is ill prepared for another one. California has more than 1.3mn residential pools, the second-highest concentration in the US after Florida. And the average pool loses about a quarter inch of water each day, or 600 gallons per week. 

In 2015, after a state order to use 25 per cent less water, several cities banned filling swimming pools altogether. But pools have not disappeared; instead, they have become an ongoing battleground in water usage. Amid a three-year drought in 2022, the reality stars Kim and Kourtney Kardashian, the actor Sylvester Stallone, NBA star Dwyane Wade and comedian Kevin Hart were among the 2,000 or so residents of Las Virgenes Municipal Water District (neighbouring Los Angeles) who were cited for using more than 150 per cent of their water budget. 

Wade and his wife Gabrielle Union stated that a leaky pool was the cause of their astronomical consumption, which in one month exceeded its budget by 489,000 gallons. The water district authorities installed a flow restrictor on Hart’s property for two weeks — a standard procedure after five warnings — though not for the Kardashians, who responded to warnings with a commitment to cut back their consumption.

Far from the breathless descriptions of lavish private pools common a century ago, the media gleefully reported the details of water-use infractions for celebrities’ lawns and pools. The status symbol so entangled with Hollywood success — see the well-known photograph of Faye Dunaway poolside, the morning after winning her Oscar in 1977 — has now become a pitfall. 

The pool’s association with abundance is finally running out. Having to let lawns die during drought has pushed more people towards replacing them with xeriscaping, which relies on native and drought-resistant plants.

Modern landscaping has also inched towards a kind of minimalism in its pool styles, such as smaller lap pools and infinity pools that appear to integrate with their surroundings. “The deep end and the diving board . . . are long gone,” says Los Angeles-based architect Todd Riley of the Landry Design Group. Instead, features such as the beach entry, Baja shelf and similar lounging areas in the pool have become popular as part of the trend towards “resort features coming into the residential pool market”, Landry notes. People still desire a “backyard oasis with beautiful features”.

The infinity pool, introduced in the 1960s, is a vision of seamless continuity between design and nature. They’ve become a luxury hotel must-have for social media photo-ops; the Post Ranch Inn in Carmel-by-the-Sea has two.

As in the early 20th century, these pools remain a symbol of both have and have-not. Infinity pools continue the illusion of never-ending water in a world increasingly aware of its scarcity.

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