Chicago, Illinois, USA

This underground pool house designed by Connecticut-based Roger Ferris + Partners is experienced as an apparition in the landscape along the coast of the Long Island Sound.

This 4,280-square-foot pool and guesthouse in Westport, Connecticut won a 2020 American Architecture Award from The Chicago Athenaeum.

The pool house is partially buried, but fully brilliant. Positioned into a subtle incline just before the land drops off to meet the beachfront, it is almost invisible as one approaches from the main entrance of the estate.

Its single story concealed beneath a verdant berm out of deference to the landscape. Save for the skylight that runs the length of its green roof, the building is hardly visible as you approach it. Even the entrance—a sloping lawn down to the front door, between two angled retaining walls— looks more like sculpture than structure.

Tucked away from the prying eyes of the world and almost seamlessly integrated within the natural landscape, the design – as Ferris himself notes – is intended to be subtlety manifest.

“I just wanted this gentle rise, with as little of the building showing as possible,” Ferris recalls of the project, designed for Fiona Garland, an avid swimmer, and her husband, Andrew Bentley. “The pool house is something you should discover.”

A grass entrance slopes down from the lawn between concrete retaining walls, leading to an airy pavilion with a lounge/bedroom and a 75-foot saltwater lap pool. The bathroom, kitchen, and mechanical systems are buried behind it.

“It feels like it’s grounded in the earth on one side and then opens up and reaches toward the sea,” Ferris notes.

Inside, elegant concrete walls bookend a 75-foot-long pool and, on the other side of a barely-there glass partition, a generous living-dining room with a Grayson Perry tapestry.

The latter room doubles as guest quarters thanks to a fold-down bed hidden behind Douglas-fir paneling. (Becky Goss of the local design store The Flat consulted on the other furnishings.)

While the northern side of the floor plan, tucked into the earth, contains the kitchen, bath, and changing areas, the south-facing window wall offers breathtaking views of the Long Island Sound.

Architects: Roger Ferris + Partners LLC.
Design Team: Roger Ferris, Robert Marx, Myron Mirgorodsky, Brian Ridgeway, Ahmed Arastu, Petra Navratilova.
Client: Fiona Garland and Andrew Bentley
Photographers: Paúl Rivera