Stainless steel pool meets nature

A new-build garden on a slope above Bad Wiessee, 2,000 m² – and at its heart a stainless steel pool with a water fountain. The pool itself came from the pool builder; everything that turns it into a garden is ours: the terraces, the walls, the steps, the planting – and, at the pool itself, the additions the pool builder did not include, from the granite slab overflow channel to the V4A slot channel. Built from summer 2014, with remaining and follow-up work until 2017.

The slope is held in masonry: layered limestone rubble masonry with 50 m³ of backing concrete, plus around 98 m² of rubble stone dry stone walls and 65 linear metres of granite block steps. The surfaces change with the setting: Hellas quartzite at the pool and terrace (75 m²), 8/10 granite small-sett paving laid in arcs, with resin-bonded joints, on the paths (115 m²), and an ipe timber deck (44 m²) by the water. Add to that 62 metres of larch picket fence, two cisterns holding a total of 6,500 litres for irrigation, garden lighting – and a garden alpine hut made of reclaimed timber, which now stands behind a sea of hydrangeas.

The planting is formal and soft at once: over 100 yews as topiary and specimen plants provide the structure – the clipping-tolerant, long-lived alternative we recommend instead of box – and in between there are lavender ‘Hidcote’, delphiniums, sage, autumn anemones, heuchera, astilbes and grasses from hakonechloa to fountain grass. In 2021 we rebuilt the terraces in quartzite, and in 2022 Corten steel edging and a sown meadow were added.

Klas Stöver’s photographs show the garden in high summer, seven years after it was created. More on the construction methods: Water in the garden · Walls and fences.

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Photos: Klas Stöver