When the architecture is award-winning, the pool can’t be an afterthought. It has to belong.

This pool sits at an internationally award-winning residence near Ghent by Govaert & Vanhoutte Architects — a practice known for buildings that feel inevitable in their landscape, and a home featured in De Tijd | Sabato. The brief was never “add a pool.” It was “extend the architecture into the water.”

So it disappears into its setting. Tucked into wooded surroundings, the pool reads less like a built object and more like something the forest always held. A 15 × 4 metre overflow pool with sloped overflow walls that follow the relief of the terrain — no hard edge fighting the ground, just water tracing the natural fall of the land. Still, dark, mirror-flat.

The finish makes it whole: concrete DEKK, seamless and monolithic, so the pool shares the material language of the house instead of interrupting it. Water and architecture, one surface.

Beneath that calm runs a full-option ZUUVR ZERO system. 100% chemical-free, naturally clean water — no chlorine to sting the eyes or hang in the air of such a serene place. The backwash water is reused rather than discarded, keeping the pool light on the resource it’s built around.

Full off-grid autonomy wasn’t possible on this site — and that’s the honest part of a design statement: not every project reaches 100%. This one runs at 90% circularity, and still proves the point that matters most