Billabong Slimline Plunge Pool Compact Challenge

A wrap-around house design posed various access challenges for this pool project. 

Not only was the courtyard area small in size, the workmen had to hand dig the excavation and cart the excess through the home.

“We had five guys wheeling barrows full of sand through the whole house,” Barrier Reef Pools director Brad Hilbert said. “We had lots of tarps and protection down so we didn’t damage the flooring; surprisingly, the dig only took one day.”

The owners of the Salter Point home knew they wanted to incorporate a pool when they built the home just a few years before, but had to wait for their finances to recover from the build before tackling the pool project. 

Barrier Reef Pool’s 4.2m by 2.6m Billabong Slimline design fitted the small space perfectly. Bench seats wrap around two sides of the pool, offering places to sit in the water and still be part of the entertainment on the adjoining timber deck. 

Chemical injection was required to stabilise the boundary fence and the concrete footings were extended on one end to incorporate a mosaic-tiled sun bed where three water spouts push a blanket of water across the tiles and into the pool. 

“The family’s young kids love to lie on the sun bed and play with the spouts,” Mr Hilbert said. 

Bluestone coping with a rebated edge borders the pool, which was finished in an Ocean Shimmer.

“It glows blue when lit at night.”

A length of artificial turf fills the area between the coping and house, softening the hardscaping and adding an extra element of greenery into the space. 

A slimline garden bed runs on the fence line, rising up into an elevated garden of trees and pebbles in the decked area. 

“It was a very restricted space and the owners have put as much as they could into it but it still looks balanced,” Mr Hilbert said. 

He said the pool was now not only a swim space but a water feature viewed from around the home, with the living zones enveloping the private outdoor retreat.