Three acres at Glenorie, in rural New South Wales. A comfortable family home, established trees, and — sitting in the middle of all that space — a small rectangular pool that could have been dropped into any suburban backyard in the country.

The block had everything. The backyard was doing almost nothing with it.

This is the story of how a standard acreage property became a resort: a 103,000-litre pool with a fire pit sunk into the middle of it, a cabana with a wet bar, a self-contained one-bedroom studio for guests who stay a little longer than planned, and a garden that finally belongs to the landscape it sits in.

Dusk at Glenorie: the dark Artisan mosaic turns the pool into a mirror, and the stone chimney anchors the terrace. 3D render, Glenorie NSW.

The concept flythrough: the camera crosses the terrace from the existing house, along the length of the water, past the fire pit island, to the cabana and the bar. 3D flythrough, Glenorie NSW.

Q&A with Jason Diamond – Design & Managing Director, Luxury Pools & Outdoor Living

Site Location

Glenorie, NSW. A three-acre parcel on the rural fringe.

The Vision

Q: What were the clients working with when you first walked the site?

Jason: A good house on a genuinely beautiful piece of land, and a pool that did not deserve either of them. It was a basic cookie-cutter shape — the kind of pool you buy rather than design. It swam perfectly well. It just had no relationship to the house, the garden, or the way this family actually lives.

That is the most common thing we see on acreage. People buy the space and then furnish the outside as though they are still on a quarter-acre block.

Q: Who is this space for?

Jason: Everybody, and that was the brief in a sentence. They have children at home and extended family who visit and stay, and they entertain properly — long evenings, a lot of people, food that takes a while.

So we were not designing a pool. We were designing somewhere a family of any size can spread out without getting in each other's way: places to swim, places to cook, places to sit by a fire, and somewhere for a guest to close a door behind them at the end of the night.

Q: Why did they come to us?

Jason: Because the job crossed too many trades to hand to a pool builder. A pool, a cabana, a studio with a bathroom, the services to run all of it, the landscaping to tie it together — on most projects that is five contractors and a homeowner in the middle trying to make them agree.

We design and build the whole outdoor space with our own staff. One team, one program, one point of responsibility. On a site this size, where every structure has to line up with every other one, that is not a convenience — it is the only way the geometry survives contact with the ground.

The wet bar and lounge under the cabana roof, with the studio wing beyond. 3D render, Glenorie NSW.

Q: What did they want to feel when it was finished?

Jason: That they did not need to go anywhere. That is the whole idea of resort-style living at home: the destination is the driveway.

Q: The design in one line?

Jason: A quiet, warm, modern retreat that looks like it grew out of the paddock rather than landing on it.

The Design Process

Q: Start with the pool. What is actually going on in there?

Jason: It is a 103,000-litre concrete pool, long and rectilinear, and it runs the length of the entertaining terrace so the water becomes the surface everything else reflects into.

The feature everybody stops at is the sunken lounge. We have set an off-form concrete seating pit inside the pool footprint — a square island with built-in banquette seating and a fire pit in the centre, wrapped on all sides by water. You step down into it. You sit below the waterline with the pool at eye level, a fire in front of you, and the garden beyond that.

There is a spa and a splash deck built into the same body of water, so the shallow end works for small children and the lap length still works for an adult who wants to swim.

The tile is Origin 50×50 in Artisan — a dark, hand-finished mosaic. Dark tile does two things on a rural block: it holds heat, and it turns the surface into a mirror. At dusk that pool stops being a pool and becomes a reflection of the sky.

The sunken lounge and fire pit, set inside the pool footprint and wrapped on all sides by water. 3D render, Glenorie NSW.

Q: Did you look at a vanishing edge?

Jason: We did, and ruled it out — worth explaining, because the two effects people ask for by name both need something this site does not have.

An infinity edge needs somewhere for the water to disappear into: a view, a fall in the land, a horizon. Glenorie is flat and enclosed by its own trees, and an infinity edge with a paddock behind it is an expensive way to build a normal pool.

A perimeter overflow was the closer call — water spilling evenly over every edge into a slot around the shell, which is what actually produces a dead-flat mirror. On the right site it is the best thing we build. Here the dark tile gets most of that reflection for a fraction of the engineering, and the difference went into the fire pit island instead.

Q: And the buildings around it?

Jason: Two structures, both under one long flat roofline.

The cabana is the social end — an open pavilion with a wet bar, room to cook and serve, lounge seating and a stone fireplace that anchors the whole terrace. It is built to be used in weather, not just in summer.

The studio is the quiet end — a self-contained one-bedroom with its own bathroom. That was one of the most specific parts of the brief and the most telling: they wanted somewhere for guests to bunker down after a good evening. Not a spare room inside the house — a door of their own, a bed, a bathroom, and the ability to surface at their own pace in the morning.

The outdoor shower and stone wall at the studio end, looking back down the length of the water. 3D render, Glenorie NSW.

Q: The materials?

Jason: Restrained, and chosen to age well outdoors.

• Natural stone cladding — Aussietecture Burnie Newstead. It does the heavy lifting: the fireplace and the feature walls are built from it, and it is the one material on site that looks like it came from the ground it is standing on.

• Timber battens — Knotwood French Walnut, for warmth.

• Render — acrylic in XF Heritage White, to keep the built forms quiet.

• Roof and fascia — Colorbond Woodland Grey.

• Underfoot — polished concrete.

Four materials, repeated everywhere. On a project with this many separate elements, discipline in the palette is what stops it reading as a collection of add-ons.

Q: Was there a moment that set the direction?

Jason: Yes, and it was a question rather than a drawing.

At the design de-brief we put it to them straight: do you want us to work the existing pool into the new design, or start again with nothing in the way? Keeping it was the cheaper answer on paper, and it would have cost the project everything else — the whole composition bending around a rectangle in the wrong place.

Their answer was to start without any hindrances in mind.

That one sentence is what this project rests on. The moment the old pool came out, the new one could go where the site actually wanted it — running the full length of the entertaining terrace, squared up to the pavilion, with a fire pit island sitting in the middle of the water. None of that survives if you are working around something you inherited.

It is the most useful thing we can say to anyone renovating on acreage: an existing pool is usually the cheapest thing to keep and the most expensive thing to design around.

Q: Anything else worth pointing out?

Jason: The planting, which is the part people underestimate.

The garden is native and dry-tolerant — flannel flowers, Leucophyta, Eremophila, saltbush, Poa labillardierei, Melaleuca Claret, Lomandra, cabbage trees, with olives for structure. Soft, silver-green, a little wild at the edges.

That is deliberate. The architecture is sharp and geometric, so the planting is the opposite. Put a manicured hedge around this and it reads as a hotel; let it go slightly loose and it reads as a home on rural land that happens to have a very good pool in it.

The pool barrier is designed to AS 1926.1 and integrated into the landscape lines rather than bolted across them, which is a detail worth getting right early — a fence resolved at design stage disappears, and one resolved at inspection stage never does.

Q: How did the clients react?

Jason: The sunken fire pit was the moment. It sounds odd in words — a fire in the middle of a swimming pool — and then you see it rendered at dusk and it is obviously the best seat on the property.

The Result

A three-acre block that used to have a pool now has a reason to walk down the garden.

The children have somewhere to swim. The adults have somewhere to sit and a bar to stand at. Guests have a door of their own. And not one metre of it is bent around a pool somebody else drew.

The pavilion reads as one long roofline across the terrace — cabana at one end, studio at the other. 3D render, Glenorie NSW.

That is what resort-style living actually means when it is done properly. Not a bigger pool — a better evening.

The full project — the brief, the design highlights, what happened behind the build and the build footage — is recorded on the Glenorie project page.

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