Making Pools in Strange Places

Somewhere between the stock tank trend and that first pandemic summer, a pool started to look like a reasonable small-scale investment, even for those who rented in places with barely a sliver of a season: "If you look at Google Maps, you’d really be surprised," said one pool-curious New York City friend recently as she counted blue ovals in apartment building backyards.

A pool is a respite from increasingly sweltering summers, a DIY status symbol, and a killer party trick: I still covet the summer over a decade ago when a friend sublet a place in Bushwick that inexplicably included a suburban-sized one on what looked to be an abandoned parking lot. The best way to dive in, we found, was through a small window near his kitchen sink—a ritual we performed nightly coming home from a long night out.

Dwell spoke to some such pool owners, and as one told us, the pool is the ultimate DIY project: No matter the size of the space or your budget, the basic materials are widely available and there is no shortage of YouTube tutorials explaining exactly what to do.

Taylor Dow, Brooklyn

For Taylor Dow, getting a pool was a gradual process that also happened to be the realization of a long-term dream. When he lived on the top floor of his building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the early 2000s, he’d look down at a neighbor’s aboveground situation and vow to have something similar of his own one day. (To add insult to injury, the neighbor appeared to take a dip only once or twice a year.) In 2012, Taylor got the chance to move to the garden level of the same building and take over the yard. At that time, he says, it was just a patch of dirt. Over the next decade, that would change.

First, as a joke, a friend brought an adult-size inflatable pool to Taylor’s birthday party one year: "It lasted about six hours before we realized it wasn’t a real thing," he says. He endeavored to find himself something that would last a bit longer, which is how he found a nearby company specializing in above-ground pools; his main request was that it use saltwater to reduce the number of chemicals he and his friends would have to endure.

Taylor is a co-owner of the campy Brooklyn dives The Commodore and The Drift. He says he likes to "embrace the idea of taking you somewhere else" with his businesses; that attitude extends to his rental, which he considers a safe haven in a corner of the city that’s been constantly under construction for at least the last 20 years. His place, by design, doesn’t really feel like New York. And he’s lucky: His landlord, so far, allows it.

The pool has inspired a few adjacent projects. First there was the structure itself, then the decking and landscaping to complement it. Last summer, Taylor added more decking still to create a clean path straight from the kitchen to the water. Naturally there’s also a billiards table downstairs.

A growing number of small pool owners have, like Taylor, chosen saline over chlorine. The upkeep for a saltwater pool, he says, is minimal, and he’d recommend it unequivocally. He has a pool guy who specializes in aboveground setups like these and travels from the Midwest to Brooklyn every summer, installing and maintaining city dwellers’ oases before going back home to "chill," Taylor says, for the rest of the year. Taylor says he’s often one of the first and last stops for this particular pool guy, who will open this Williamsburg haven in the middle of May and keep it functional as late as November. Even if it’s too cold to go for a swim, Taylor enjoys being able to gaze out at the water.