Rooftop Pools To Make Your Head Swim

Even in the world of luxury real estate, there’s an amenity reserved for the highest of high-end residences: the rooftop swimming pool.

For the fortunate few who can indulge in luxury homes and favor a swim hundreds of feet in the air, good news. Thanks to engineering advances and increasingly demanding consumers, rooftop and balcony pools are proliferating. And the newest pools are fancier than ever.

What’s behind the demand? Some buyers want the rooftop pool for exercise. Some just want to show off to guests. Either way, these pools add an air of serenity to big-city living. But constructing an elevated pool, especially one over a livable area, remains a challenge for designers and engineers — albeit an intriguing one. I say so because I’ve recently seen the technical side up close. My colleagues and I are developing a building in Miami, called Brickell Flatiron, with an open-air pool on its 700-foot roof.

First, the building structure must support the weight of a pool. After all, water is very heavy. A single cubic foot contains 7.48 gallons and weighs more than 62 pounds. So just the water alone in a standard lap pool — in feet, figure 75 long, 15 wide and four deep — weighs nearly 281,000 pounds. The pool must be shaped in a way that evenly transfers the weight of the water to the supporting walls and columns. The pool vessel can then be placed within what engineers call a ring truss, keeping the building top well-connected. A series of steel posts carry the load of the pool onto the level below.

Next comes the decision of what material to use for the pool vessel itself. The proper material must be selected so as not to cause leaks. Concrete, for the pool in your backyard, is prone to cracking and not a wise choice. Perhaps it’s good enough when you’re building over a parking garage — but not when there are people living below.

The pool vessel is normally craned to the location in pieces and then welded together, but may arrive by helicopter in unibody form. Cutting-edge ceramics and carbon-fiber composite technology from the aerospace and motor sports industries are sneaking into some pool designs.

Constructing a pool is significantly more complex when you factor in intense environmental forces. Engineers must account for wind load — no small feat in a hurricane-prone city like Miami, where towers must be built to withstand gusts of 175 miles per hour. Skyscrapers just about everywhere are designed to move ever so slightly, syncing constantly with the wind. Engineers call the movement “drift.” A lot of thinking goes into how a building should deal with high winds, and I can’t do it justice here. But a Category 4 or 5 hurricane’s gusts can cause the top of a tall building to drift 12 inches. In cities like Los Angeles and Tokyo, engineers have earthquakes to contend with. Fortunately, the skyscrapers these pools are mounted on are designed to be robust.

And if structural and architectural considerations are not enough, design plays a huge role in functionality. For example, the deck can’t be slippery. Wood looks great, but it’s unbearable in hot climates. Improperly secured objects can be a hazard. (Where do you think those loose deck chairs are going when the wind picks up?) You have to make a pool easy to access, naturally. The wrong temperature, lighting or even tile color can trip you up. Then all that water must be filtered and purified. The busier a pool, the faster every bit of water must recirculate.

Get the details right, though, and you’ve got something extraordinary. One of the most eye-catching rooftop pools is under construction now in Monaco. It’s an enormous, oval infinity pool attached to a penthouse atop the Tour Odeon, a new 49-story building designed by architect Alexandre Giraldi. The pool is even equipped with a slide descending from a balcony.

This is the first skyscraper constructed in Monaco in nearly three decades, so there’s plenty of pent-up demand and controversy. Word on the street, says the London Daily Mail, is that the penthouse will auction for around $390 million. Now let me just find my paddle.

Here's my list of some of the more remarkable pools in the world, some proposed, some under construction and some already up and running.

1. Building: Odeon Tower. Location: Monaco. Pool is exclusive to the penthouse, which is reportedly expected to sell for $390 million.
2. Building: Honeycomb Building. Location: Albany, Nassau Bahamas. Designed by Danish architect Bjarke Ingels. Community partially owned by Tiger Woods. Swimmers get a view of their nearby super yachts.
3. Building: Brickell Flatiron. Location: Miami. This is one my colleagues and I are working on. Swim 700 feet up. The view goes 360 degrees and reaches all the way to the Atlantic Ocean.
4. Building: Jade Signature. Location: Miami Beach. Designed by Pritzker Prize-winner Herzog & de Meuron.
5. Building: 551 W 21 Street. Location: New York City. Designed by famed architect Norman Foster. Asking price for the home: $50 million.
6. Building: The Avenue. Location: Washington, DC. Views of Foggy Bottom, DuPont Circle.

7. 50 United Nations Plaza. Views of Manhattan from private balcony pools.... [+] (HayesDavidson/HayesDavidson)

   Building: 50 United Nations Plaza. Location: New York City. Private balcony pools have a view of Manhattan.

8. Building: Sky Condos. Location: Lima Peru. Mexican architects DCPP Arquitectos proposes to cantilever these pools like diving boards from every balcony.
9. Building: 300 Front Street. Location: Toronto, Canada. Swimmers get access to adjacent private cabanas and Roman fountain.
10. Building: Sky Habitat. Location: Singapore. Designed by Moshe-Safdie. Three bridging gardens and roof pool overlook the center of the city.
11. Building: Montage. Location: Beverly Hills. The 20 vintage-style units sold for an average of $8.8 million each. Salt water pool.
12. Building: One Shenzhen Bay. Location, Shenzhen, China. Swim 1,107 feet up. Designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox. Views of Shenzhen Bay Bridge that connects to Hong Kong.
13. Building: Soori High Line. Location: New York City. Private pools. Views of the famed High Line park and Lower Manhattan.
14. Building: TwentyOne Anguillia Park. Location: Singapore. Private pools, 36 stories, designed by SDCA Architects.

Vanessa Grout is a real estate invester and marketer. She is president of CMC Real Estate, the sales and marketing division of Miami-based property developer CMC Group. Additional reporting by Danilo Nanni at DeSimone Consulting Engineers and Keith Kulynych of Revuelta Architecture International in Miami.