Imagination Surfaces in Valley Pool Culture : Trends: What’s new is how area residents design and use their back-yard swimming holes. Some include islands, a sandy beach or waterfalls.

Azure-colored water ripples over the knife-edge of the pool, seeming to plunge into the valley below. As the sun sets, a couple relaxes in the pool’s center, sipping a cocktail and admiring the view.

The scene is not from a TV commercial for martinis or for an upscale resort. The pool, a stunning example of the increasingly popular “horizon” or “infinity” design, is in the back yard of a residence in Studio City above the San Fernando Valley.

“We really enjoy the pool when we use it,” owner Donna Slates, an interior designer, said. “With the view, it’s like having a personal, huge painting. It’s a huge canvas and the pool is part of it.”

“Honestly, it’s exciting and I don’t get excited about much,” gushed her husband, Ron, a lawyer.

Welcome to Valley pool culture, Summer of ’93 style. They say the American dream is to own a home and the Southern California dream is to own a home with a pool. If the Slates are anything to go by, Valley residents are dreaming big--as big as those who live on the other side of the Santa Monica Mountains in traditionally more glamorous enclaves.

Pools have been as much a staple of the Valley lifestyle as they are in any region of the Southland, said Jim McCloskey, editor of the Pool and Spa News trade magazine, and perhaps even more so.

“The Valley is the place where the middle-class and the pool industry came together,” he said. Given its extreme summer heat and greater distance from the beach contrasted with the Westside, the Valley experienced “a virtual explosion in the pool industry,” he said.

“If you flew in a helicopter over an area like Woodland Hills, you’d be hard-pressed to find homes without pools,” McCloskey said.

What’s changing in the Valley is how people design their pools and how they use them. Fancy a pool with an island in the middle, a sandy beach or a waterfall cascading down “rocks” made of concrete or steel? Forget poolside, why not “in-pool” drinks on bar stools in the water? Or how about a game of volleyball with a net strung across the pool?

“You can go as far as the designer’s imagination can take you,” Randy Bauer of Symphony Pools in Northridge said. “You can design anything.”

Most Valley pools are still of the standard rectangular or kidney-shaped variety. But in affluent neighborhoods from Studio City to Calabasas, it’s not hard to find custom-designedpools that would not be out of place in Acapulco or on the French Riviera, let alone in Beverly Hills or Bel-Air.

At the new Stonegate development in West Hills, for instance, the model homes feature pools built by Bauer. They include an “infinity” pool with concrete columns running along its edge, designed so the water overflows into a basin below and then is pumped back into the pool. There’s also a 44-foot-long lap pool with fish fountain heads where the spa is the overflow basin. “It’s a hydraulic nightmare,” Bauer said of the lap pool.

Aquatic Pools of Sherman Oaks has designed cantilevered pools that hang over hillsides, several “horizon” pools and even one in Sherman Oaks that is incorporated into the structure of the house--a column supporting the residence runs through the pool to the foundations below and the water laps up against the living room.

The firm was responsible for the Slates’ pool. “What I like about this pool is the knife-edge look,” company President Bernard Zimring said. “It’s a nice, sharp edge. It’s difficult to keep it balanced all the way ‘round.”

Of course, these designs aren’t cheap. Where the basic rectangle might cost $20,000, a custom pool with decking and landscaping could easily come in at $150,000--the Slates’ was about $50,000. But the price of the pool is relative to that of the house, Zimring said. “You have houses going for several million, so spending a quarter of a million on a pool is not so absurd.”

An in-built spa is almost compulsory with pools in the Valley. Both Zimring and Bauer said about 90% of the pools they build include a spa. “It’s because of cost,” Bauer explained. “A basic spa built along with the pool will cost about $3,500. If you add it on later, it will be $12,000.”

Poolside barbecues are just as ubiquitous. “There’s a premium on being able to have casual poolside living--the barbecue beside the pool, parents sipping iced tea, kids splashing in the water,” McCloskey said.

Some pool owners go a lot further. Bauer recalled one residence in Chatsworth where bathers sat on bar stools in the water, sipping drinks they balanced on a 10-by-2-foot counter over the pool. A current craze is to have the pool double as an aquatic volleyball court. All you need is a shallow depth of 3 1/2 feet at each end, five feet in the middle and a net strung above the water.

The more lavish pools almost look too good to use. “They’re waterscapes rather than swimming pools,” McCloskey said. “Some designers market pools as waterscapes. . . . Swimming in them is an afterthought.”

“You can find people who look at the pool 95% of the time and might use it 5% of the time,” Zimring agreed. “The value of the pool for them is enjoying its appearance and the aesthetic value added on to the house.”

The Slates had some teething problems with their “horizon” pool. “When we first had it, some water overflowed and ran down the hill,” Donna Slates recalled. “Luckily nobody was down there.” But they have no hesitation about using it as much as possible.

“You can hang out over the edge and look out over the whole Valley,” Ron Slates said. “It’s absolutely a spectacular thing.”