Embassy Gardens - the name of the luxury property opened in May in south London, right next to the American embassy, sounded sophisticated and cosmopolitan.
However, it made headlines less with its construction costs of a billion pounds than with the pool of the house: a transparent pool between two apartment blocks, 35 meters above the ground.
A world first.
The view from the “Sky Pool” extends to the Palace of Westminster and the London Eye, and if you look down you can watch the passers-by on the street.
The acrylic pool - 25 meters long, five meters wide, three meters deep - was so difficult to construct that it had to be built by a company in Colorado and then taken to London by ship.
"World-class leisure facility"
Real luxury for the residents of the Embassy Gardens and their guests. One could think so. But now resistance is forming: the pool should go, at least in winter. Local residents complain in an internal Facebook group that it is way too cold to swim in it for more than a few minutes. Not true, says developer Ballymore: The pool is “a world-class recreational facility” and is also “very popular” in winter, the water is kept at a temperature of 30 degrees.
However, it seems undisputed that the costs of heating the 375 tons of water are not insignificant: It should cost the equivalent of almost 200,000 euros to heat the pool all year round. More than 500 euros per day. This is passed on to the owners of the residential building, some of whom had paid up to 5.3 million euros for their apartments, with a "service fee" that costs over 10,000 euros a year for an apartment with two bedrooms. Angry residents told UK media that the pool was barely used and that the cover had been broken for weeks. “We basically heat the sky.” Aside from the prestige, there is also a solid reason why the pool was built on the tenth floor above the street (at least the architects say):There was simply no other place to accommodate a pool in the construction plans.