Kat Black Design Studio designs and constructs luxury swimming pools for villa owners across Dubai, delivering infinity pools, family pools, lap pools and plunge pools as integrated elements of the villa’s overall outdoor design. A well-designed pool is the most commercially significant single outdoor investment a Dubai villa owner can make, both for the quality of life it provides during the October to April outdoor season and for the property value it adds relative to equivalent villas without a pool. Kat Black Design Studio approaches every pool commission as an architectural design challenge, not merely a civil engineering exercise, designing the pool shape, finish, coping detail, surrounding terrace and planting backdrop as a composed outdoor environment that is as impressive to look at from the villa’s interior as it is to swim in.
Kat Black Design Studio designs and constructs pools across four primary typologies for Dubai villa owners, each appropriate to a different brief, garden size and lifestyle requirement.
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The infinity pool, also known as a vanishing edge or negative edge pool, creates the visual illusion that the water surface extends to the horizon by allowing the water to overflow one or more edges into a concealed catch basin below, from which it is recirculated back into the pool. In Dubai villa gardens, where privacy walls, neighbouring properties and the flat topography of most residential communities limit the dramatic distant views that infinity pools are designed to frame, the visual effect is achieved by setting the overflow edge against the garden boundary wall, creating a reflective plane at the same height as the terrace surface and producing a still, mirror-like water surface that reads as a design object rather than merely a functional pool.
Infinity pools require additional structural and hydraulic engineering relative to a standard pool: the overflow edge must be precisely level to within one millimetre across its full length, the catch basin must be sized correctly for the volume of water displaced by bather activity and the recirculation system must be capable of managing the continuous flow from the overflow edge without the pool water level dropping below the coping. Kat Black Design Studio coordinates all infinity pool engineering with specialist structural engineers and pool hydraulic consultants from the earliest design stage.
Design
Lap pools are elongated, narrow pools designed primarily for exercise swimming. A standard lap pool configuration is 25 metres by 3 to 4 metres, though in Dubai villa gardens where space is limited, shorter lap pools of 12 to 18 metres with a counter-current jet system provide a practical alternative that delivers the exercise benefit of lap swimming within a smaller footprint. Kat Black Design Studio designs lap pools as visually elegant elements of the garden composition, using the pool’s linear form as a structuring element that organises the surrounding terrace and planting in a formal, rectilinear garden layout.
A counter-current jet system in a shorter lap pool generates a controllable opposing water flow that the swimmer swims against, effectively creating an endless pool experience in a pool of 10 to 15 metres. The jet system is specified from commercial pool equipment suppliers and is integrated within the pool’s recirculation and filtration system. Kat Black Design Studio specifies counter-current systems for all lap pools below 20 metres in length.
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Design
The plunge pool is the most spatially efficient pool type for Dubai villa gardens with limited outdoor areas, covering a floor area of 4 by 3 metres to 8 by 4 metres whilst still providing the cooling and water play function that makes a pool valuable in Dubai’s climate. Plunge pools are also the most appropriate pool type for rooftop terraces in penthouse and duplex penthouse properties, where the structural loading of a full-size pool would not be supportable without specialist structural engineering. Kat Black Design Studio designs plunge pools for both ground-level villa gardens and rooftop terrace applications, coordinating structural loading assessments with a structural engineer for all elevated pool installations.
A well-designed plunge pool in a compact villa garden can be as visually impressive as a larger pool if its position, finish, coping detail and surrounding treatment are designed as integrated elements. Kat Black Design Studio designs plunge pools with attention to the relationship between the water surface and the terrace level, the material of the coping and surround, the planting immediately adjacent to the pool edge and the lighting within the pool that creates the glowing quality of water at night that is one of the most atmospheric features of any outdoor design.
Kat Black Design Studio has completed projects across Dubai Hills Estate, Palm Jumeirah, Emirates Hills, DIFC and beyond. If you are ready to discuss your interior design, renovation, fit-out or landscaping project anywhere in Dubai or the UAE, request a complimentary consultation today, with no obligation.
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