If time is the ultimate luxury, space runs a close second. And space for luxury leisure at home is becoming a must-have in super-prime London. Increasingly, home owners are dreaming of basement saunas, cigar rooms, yoga studios, meditation rooms, wine cellars, cinemas, and of course swimming pools. But underground pools come with a unique set of challenges from a structural perspective.
Here are our top five tips to consider when designing a swimming pool in a basement space:
- Allow enough room for services. At ED, we often receive projects that have found the space for the swimming pool but have not considered where the extensive plant required to operate the pool will be housed. Often this requires a below-slab space almost as large as the pool itself.
- Allow space for the structure. Swimming pools tucked tight up against the structural wall of the basement may look neat, but the pool needs to be constructed as a secondary box inside the main structural walls. The inside line of the pool is therefore usually at least 300mm inside the main wall line.
- Consider M&E requirements. Swimming pool rooms are very humid environments and require significant ducting to maintain the atmospheric requirements of the room. This additional ceiling-mounted equipment needs to be considered in the overall thickness of the floor above.
- Think drainage. Pools have to be drained from time to time, so the method of doing this must be taken into account. Is there a limit on the volume of water that can be drained into the sewer? Will the water require processing before leaving the site to remove chemicals? The answers to these questions may result in more complicated below ground drainage configurations than expected.
- Managing flotation. An empty pool coupled with a high water table has the possibility of resulting in substantial uplift pressures from below. The best way to counter these forces is either to use the load of the building above to resist the forces or introduce tension piles below the pool.
At ED, we’re passionate about sharing our structural engineering expertise. To find out more about what we can do and how we can help with your construction project, please give us a call on 020 8785 4499 or drop us an email to hello@elitedesigners.co.uk.
