This week we are showing you the most luxurious swimming pools money can buy, equipped with movable floors!

A common stumbling block for homeowners who want a swimming pool is that they don’t have enough room. This is particularly challenging in cities such as London where space is a luxury. The solution? Movable swimming pool floors.

 

What is a Movable Floor?

When not in use, swimming pools traditionally use swimming pool covers to prevent heat loss through evaporation and therefore they are used for insulation. The “Rolls Royce” of swimming pools use movable floors, also known as raising floors, which go above and beyond the function of swimming pool covers.

As the name implies they raise and lower as needed from the base of your pool. When raised, the pool completely vanishes leaving you with a smooth high-quality tiled space. This space can then be used for multiple purposes ranging from a gym space to a dance floor!

 

Safety

Movable floors function using either air rams, or a winch system. They must be thoroughly tested to ensure they can withstand large weights as it can carry 250kg/m2, making it the safest pool cover solution in the world! Unsurprisingly they are highly technical items which always require specialist engineering to design and install.

 

Project Example

One of the leading companies at providing movable floors are Twinscape (www.twinscapegroup.com). Twinscape’s moving floors only take 8 minutes to rise to the top of the swimming pool.  Twinscape has been a part of luxury swimming pool projects across the globe including this project on Kiawah Island in the USA.

 

Twinscape’s project on Kiawah Island

 

 

Kiawah Island project with the moving floor raised to the top of the pool.

 

 

Insulation 

Movable floors also remain great insulators. The R-Value measures the thermal resistance of a material, the higher the R-Value the better. Whereas, the U-Value represents how much heat is lost through the depth of the material, and therefore a low U-Value is ideal. A Twinscape movable floor, (based on a project with 20mm ceramic tiles and a 3mm adhesive) will have an R-value of 1.639 m2.K/W and a U-Value of 0.61 W/m²K. Therefore, the movable pool floor is an exceptional insulator.

 

Space Recovery

The most important function of movable swimming pool floors is that they recover space that would normally be absorbed by the swimming pool when not in use. Therefore, the movable swimming pool floor is the ultimate solution for space creation and is often chosen for elite projects. Twinscape tends to have more outdoor movable floor projects in America where there are limited spaces such as on terraces and balconies. Whilst in the United Kingdom, they regularly have basement swimming pool projects in London where the space is utilised as a party space when not in use!

 

 

Twinscape project based in London.
Moving Floor raised to the top.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Summary

Movable swimming pool floors are undoubtedly the ultimate solution for covering swimming pools, as you can reclaim precious space, both indoors and outdoors.

For information on conventional covers, see our guide on choosing swimming pool covers.

Images courtesy of Twinscape (www.twinscapegroup.com)