Pools, Gyms & Recreation

For a resort, the pool is frequently the hero - the signature image, the social centre, the reason the photograph sells the stay - so it deserves the siting and design attention a hero earns. The first and most important decisions are about where it goes and what it looks at. A great resort pool is placed to capture the best the site offers: the view (sea, valley, skyline, garden), the sun (oriented for the hours guests actually want it), and crucially the first glimpse on arrival - many of the most celebrated resorts reveal the pool and its setting as the climax of the arrival sequence, so the guest gasps before they have even checked in. The infinity edge, where the water appears to merge with the sea or sky beyond, is the most famous device for exactly this reason: it fuses the pool with its setting and makes the whole landscape part of the swim.

The pool is also a social space, and the design of everything around the water often matters as much as the pool itself. The deck - loungers, shade, planting, the pool bar, the route to it - is where guests actually spend their day, so it needs generous, well-zoned space: sun and shade, active and quiet, places to see and be seen and places to retreat. A pool bar, food service, towel station and easy access to changing and restrooms turn a pool from a tank of water into a destination you can spend all day in.

Beyond the single hero pool, leisure hotels increasingly offer a family of water: a main pool, a quiet or adults-only pool, a children's pool, a hot tub, perhaps a lazy river or a rooftop pool as an urban hotel's hero. Each has a different mood and clientele and should be zoned and designed accordingly. Throughout, remember that the pool is experienced as part of the landscape and outdoor realm (Lesson 6.4) - its relationship to planting, terrace, building and view is the design, not just the shape of the basin. A beautifully sited, socially generous pool can define a resort; a pool dropped thoughtlessly into leftover space, facing a wall and the car park, is a wasted hero.

The sparkling stillness a guest sees is the visible face of a continuously running technical system, and understanding that machine - even while you defer its specifics - is essential to designing a pool that works. Pool water is constantly drawn off, filtered, treated and returned; it is heated; its chemistry is dosed and monitored; and all of this requires a plant room with pumps, filters, a balance tank, heating and controls, plus backwash drainage - bulky, noisy equipment that needs a proper location, service access and acoustic isolation so its hum never reaches the guest. A pool is not a decorative basin you fill once; it is a circulating, serviced system that runs every hour of every day.

Indoor pools raise the difficulty sharply. A heated body of water in an enclosed hall throws off enormous humidity, and that warm, chemically-laden moist air is corrosive - it attacks steel, fixings, finishes and the building fabric, streams condensation down cold glass, and breeds mould if uncontrolled. Indoor pool halls therefore need powerful, carefully designed dehumidification and ventilation, warm surfaces to limit condensation, and corrosion-resistant materials and fixings throughout. This is a specialist engineering problem: get it wrong and an indoor pool will literally corrode its own building and make the hall unpleasant and unhealthy to be in.

Then there is safety, which in and around water is serious and non-negotiable, and which you design around rather than invent. Depth and gradient, non-slip surfaces, edge and overflow detailing, clear sightlines for lifeguards or supervision, controlled access (especially to keep unsupervised children away from water), rescue provision and signage are all governed by standards, the operator's protocols and specialist advice. As a designer you create the experience and the space, and you defer the water treatment, the plant sizing, the humidity engineering and every pool-safety specific to the pool and MEP engineers, the relevant standards and the operator - exactly the "design the principles, defer the binding specifics" discipline this course keeps returning to. The glamour of the pool is earned by respecting the machine and the risk beneath it.

For decades the hotel gym was a grudging afterthought: a small, often windowless basement room with a couple of treadmills and a mirror, ticked off a checklist and forgotten. That era is over. Driven by the wellness boom and by guests - especially business and younger travellers - who expect to keep up their training on the road, the fitness offer has become a serious, sometimes signature, amenity, and designing it well now matters commercially. A good hotel gym can be a genuine reason guests choose and return to a property.

Getting it right starts with location and daylight. The old instinct to bury the gym in a dark basement is usually wrong: people train better and longer in a space with natural light, a view, good ventilation and air quality, and a sense of generosity, so the best hotels give fitness a proper window, a view of the garden or city, and real ceiling height. The equipment mix and zoning matter too - cardio, resistance machines, free weights, and increasingly a functional-training / stretching zone - and each needs the right space, floor, mirrors and servicing (power, ventilation, and floors that take dropped weights). Sweat, heat and humidity mean gyms need good air handling and durable, hygienic finishes, and proximity to changing, showers and towels is essential.

The fitness offer also increasingly extends beyond the gym box into studios for yoga, pilates or group classes, and outdoors - a lawn for yoga at sunrise, a running route, a court - linking fitness to the landscape and wellness realms (Lessons 6.1 and 6.4). As with everything in this module, benchmarks for gym size and equipment counts are illustrative starting points to calibrate to the brand, market and guest profile, not rules - a city business hotel, a family resort and a dedicated wellness retreat need very different fitness offers. And as always, the specifics of equipment installation, floor loading, ventilation rates and any pool/sauna adjacencies defer to the relevant specialists. The shift to take from this section is simply that fitness is no longer a box to tick - it is an amenity guests judge you on, and it deserves real design.

The last piece of the leisure offer is children, families and recreation, and in a resort or family hotel it is far more important to the business than its modest glamour suggests: a property that delights children wins the whole family's loyalty, because parents return where their kids were happy and safe. Designing for play is therefore a real commercial strategy, not a soft extra.

The heart of it is often the kids' club - a supervised, bright, safe, stimulating space designed around children of different ages, with activity zones, craft and play areas, a quiet corner, easy-clean durable finishes, good sightlines for supervision, and secure access control so children cannot wander off or strangers in. It needs its own child-scaled furniture and fittings, proper hygiene and sanitation, and a close relationship to a children's pool and outdoor play where the climate allows. The best kids' clubs are genuinely imaginative places children beg to go back to - and every hour a child spends happily supervised there is an hour the parents spend (and spend money) relaxing elsewhere in the resort.

Beyond the kids' club, recreation spans a wide and property-specific range: courts and games, a games room, sports and water sports, a lawn for events and play, a cinema room, a teen zone, activity and excursion bases. What to include is a briefing and market decision - an urban business hotel needs almost none of this, while a family beach resort lives or dies by it - so calibrate the offer to the guest and the brand rather than copying a list. Two design principles run through all of it. First, safety and supervision around play and water are serious and are designed around standards, access control and the operator's protocols, with the specifics deferred exactly as for pools. Second, recreation should feel generous, genuine and part of the place, woven into the landscape and the experience, not bolted on as a sad, token playground in a corner. Designed with real care, the family and recreation offer turns a hotel from a place people visit once into a place families come back to for years - which is the most valuable thing leisure design can achieve.