Designing Pool Fencing: Robin’s Top Tips

Where safety meets style in Swimming Pool design

Designing a swimming pool area is about more than the water itself, more than the size or depth, it’s about how the pool connects to your home and garden, and about the way you live. A beautifully resolved pool landscape balances aesthetics, functionality and safety, ensuring that swimming pool fencing requirements meet the NZ standards, without ruining the beauty and focus of a pool.

With clever planning, pool fencing design can protect, whilst not dominating or distracting from the wider views. The right materials, clever spatial design, planting, and detailing can turn a safety requirement into a part of the design rather than just a pool fencing barrier. Any amount of creative ideas can encompass the idea of “Pool Barrier” as long as you meet the measurement criteria of correct heights, openings of less then 100mm gap, no toeholds within the required range etc.

Below are a few key principles we follow to ensure every element works together seamlessly. For in-depth information, follow the link below:

https://www.building.govt.nz/assets/Uploads/building-code-compliance/f-safety-of-users/f9-restricting-access-residential-pools/asvm/f9-restricting-access-to-residential-pools.pdf

Spatial Design

The pool positioning can make or break how a pool sits in your living area. The pool fencing completely alters the living spaces around your pool as the fencing creates areas “inside” and “outside” the pool”.

• Your swimming pool may sit beautifully in your view over spacious lawns, but the addition of a pool fence can totally remove your access to the lawns beyond, creating convoluted pathways around the pool.
• A pool is important for maybe 5 months of the year but the access to the remaining property is year round. If the swimming pool is in the wrong place it can absolutely destroy any chance of a seamless flow onto your lawns.
• When positioning the pool you must think 3 dimensionally. Two layers of fences will alter the view and access in an irrevocable way, so consider sliding the pool slightly to the side to still allow access to the remaining parts of your property. No amount of clever pool fence design can replace a blocked access way.
• Consider frameless glass fencing.
• Use glass sparingly where the view matters most. For example the horizon edge of a pool or the main sightline from your outdoor living.
• Soften the base with low planting to conceal fittings and blend structure into nature.
• Framed "windows" of glass can create elegant visual links through the garden.
  
  

Glass Fencing

When positioned well, glass fencing, frameless, or even with posts becomes almost invisible, in the way that a window glass can seem invisible. It allows the pool and the landscape beyond to remain visually connected to the house and landscape.

• Consider frameless glass fencing in the key viewing lines from the house so that views of the pool are not  fully obstructed. Be aware that glass can become reflective when placed far from the viewer or on an angle to the sight line, so placing it only in the front line is often enough. If your view beyond the pool is an essential component, consider a “Haha” type fence option or a fence below the sight line to allow full visual access out from the pool enclosure.  
• Glass is expensive and needs to be kept clean so use it sparingly where the view matters most. A change of material from glass to a steel fence can be off-putting so obscure a change in materials with hedging or another solid material, so that you are less aware of the abrupt change.
• By planting at the base of glass the fittings are obscured and it truly disappears, becoming like a window pane. If planting at the base though, plant similar on both sides to avoid the one-sided view onto leaves squashed up against glass. Sometimes where space is premium, we use only small grasses, Mondo grass or Liriope, at the base just to hide the fixings and create that layer of green which removes the harshness of glass on paving.
• Framed “windows” of glass can create elegant visual links through the garden. Framed by hedging or walls, a window to the outside can be a whimsical connection.

 Infinity-edge pools or frameless glass fencing enhances rather than interrupts the vista.


Retaining Walls or Infinity-edge Pools as Fencing

On sloping sites, the contour of the land can be used to conceal a barrier— reducing the need for visible fencing.

• Infinity edge pools can create their own non climbable barrier, negating the need for visible pool fencing. This needs careful design to comply as the Safety from Falling  rules apply when the drop is 1 metre or over and the required drop for the Pool fencing barrier is 1.2metre. Landscape designers become adept at creating the conditions where the pool barrier and the safety from falling requirements are both met.
• A “Haha” is a hidden fence in the grand tradition of English estate gardens. Effectively it means that you create a dip in which a fence can sit which is invisible in the perspective view. Most commonly in pool fencing, this is a trench around the pool where the innermost wall is 1200mm to comply with a pool fence. Tricks around this to avoid safety from falling usually require an up-stand so that the distance from paving to the bottom of the Haha is just under a metre. A “Haha” is a very effective but costly solution.
• A retaining wall with low planting can be incorporated as pool fencing behind the pool using the face of the wall as a 1.2m barrier with specific non-climbable materiality. Again, clever design is needed to comply with the safety from falling regulations.
• Take advantage of a slope and space your fence out onto the lower level so that it is more easily concealed with planting. The top of the fence easily gets below your eyeline in this case.
• Let the land do the work. Layered levels and subtle elevation changes used to conceal fencing and preserve outlooks.

Let the land do the work. Layered levels and subtle elevation changes used to conceal fencing and preserve outlooks.

Stone Walls and Natural Materials

Stone walls used as pool fencing add character and warmth to a pool area. Something about stone and water adjacent to each other feels so very right. Using stonewalls as part of the pool fencing can add a sense of permanence and beauty to your perimeter solutions. Other materials that might replicate the house materials or the colours of the surrounding landscape can be used as long as they meet the requirements of the Building Code. This takes some creative thought to create design cohesion.

• The most important with stone as pool fencing is to create no “toeholds”. This means that the stone must have a relatively smooth face so that no stone protrudes more than 10mm or no crack in the mortar joints is wider than 10mm.  This is so that it remains unclimbable. Natural stone is always associated in nature with water. it weathers beautifully over time, enhancing the sense of permanence.
• Use materials like schist, limestone, or basalt that might occur naturally in your area. This brings a sense of place, integrity and cohesion into your specific environment.
• Other materials such as vertical timber feature walls or corten steel, solid or as blades, can create a sculptural element to the pool fencing. Sometimes these might be higher than the 1.2metre mandatory height requirement to create a statement.

Pool Boundaries with Hedges

Living hedges create privacy and tranquillity around a pool without hard barriers.

• A hedge actually increases the safety of a pool barrier. A good dense hedge is impossible to climb over for an adult, let alone a 5 year old. It is safer always to plant your hedge on the inside of the fence to ensure that you comply with the no toehold or climbing point rules.
• Let the hedge’s leaves grow through the steel bars as you trim and the pool fence then  becomes invisible. This is a good trick to keep the pool feeling like  part of the garden rather than an intrusion. Sometimes we make “windows in the hedges with a surprise piece of glass capturing a view. .Ficus “tuffi “is perfect for growing into a fence but so are camellias, mulehnbeckia, coprosma, or olearia if you want a more native garden.
• Hedging as part of your fencing creates structure and a really good opportunity to control views.

Robin