Concrete Bath Pavilion

A private client with a long-standing bathing ritual asked for a garden pavilion built around water and silence. The programme was minimal — three pools at three temperatures — but the client wanted the experience of moving between them to feel like moving between three different rooms of sky.

The pavilion is three roofless concrete courts, linked in a shallow zig-zag so that no court is visible from another. Each court is walled only as high as it needs to be to remove the surrounding landscape from view, so that once you are in the water the only thing overhead is an unbroken rectangle of sky that changes with each court's orientation.

Water moves between the courts through a single channel cut into the concrete floor, warm to cool, so the sound of the pavilion is always the sound of that one thin stream. There is no mechanical plant visible anywhere in the composition; everything is buried under the entry court's raised threshold.

The concrete was cast with a deliberately coarse local aggregate and left entirely unsealed, so the walls darken with water and lighten as they dry — the building keeps a visible record of use.