Moving away from the usual hip-hop boasts about money, cars and women, Drake focuses on a more specific point of pride in his January-released song “Summer Sixteen”: his pool. With its extensive stone grottos, deluxe wet bar and illuminated waterfalls, the rapper’s backyard lagoon — which is part of the $7.7 million Hidden Hills estate that he purchased in 2012 — is spotlighted in the verse “Now I got a bigger pool than Ye.”
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Drake and Kanye West, who has since ripped up his pool and is reportedly in the process of replacing it with a massive, lake-style oasis, are hardly alone in their obsession. “I’m seeing more people wanting to create incredible-looking pools,” says interior designer Martyn Lawrence Bullard, who has worked on the homes of Cher and The Osbournes. “The days of the white, simple pool are gone.” Instead, he says, homeowners are opting for customized elements like Italian mosaic tile floors, Baja shelves for tanning, lit torches that rise from the water, underwater sound systems, fiber-optic lighting, ornate fountains and water slides.
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Pools can start around $50,000 but often exceed $1 million and take years to complete. Super-mansion architect Richard Landry (who has built homes for Mark Wahlberg and Rod Stewart) spent years working on an aquatic masterpiece for a client that “starts with a beach entrance and a lazy river that takes you all the way to the end of the property, where you have an infinity pool with a swim-up bar.”
An oasis-style pool in the same vein as Drake’s constructed for $1 million in Los Angeles’ Hidden Hills.
Courtesy of The Altman Brothers
If homeowners are working with any limitations, though, they aren’t stemming from environmental concerns. “I wish I could tell you yes,” says real estate agent Josh Altman, of the Bravo series Million Dollar Listing, when asked if the California drought was causing Los Angeles residents to curtail projects. “In a town where pool parties are so important, nobody cares.”
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When Hollywood business manager John McIlwee and film producer Bill Damaschke decided to add a pool to the Garcia House, a famous rainbow-shaped Hollywood Hills abode designed by architect John Lautner, they enlisted the firm Marmol Radziner. “In L.A., there’s value added to a house specifically related to having a pool,” says McIlwee. Their design took nearly two years and “a ton of money,” but it was worth the price. “Even if it costs a little bit more than you want to spend, at the end of the day you’re going to get that money back,” says Altman, who notes that he has seen the absence of a pool sink a potential sale.
The current owners of the Garcia House commissioned their pool to be designed in a shape that complemented the home’s unique architecture.
Richard Powers
Property value aside, there’s a certain cachet to having the best pool on the block that can’t always be quantified. “It’s a good bragging right when you’re spending that kind of money and you want to show off,” says Altman. “That’s where size does matter.”
This story originally appeared in the March 12 issue of Billboard.
