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DEPARTMENTS TECHNOLOGY
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NORTHERN ITALY’S
HOTEL MARINI
NO TECHNOLOGY IS
NEW TECHNOLOGY FOR POOLS |
by PATTI CONNOR
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Luxury hotels and resorts are pulling out all the stops to incorporate eco-friendly amenities designed to harmonize with their surroundings and make a splash with environmentally conscious guests. The eco-pool may be the next must-have.
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In 2005, the Hotel Marini, a thirty-year-old resort near Meran in the South Tyrol, Northern Italy, decided the time had come to upgrade its swimming pool. The Marini family wanted something special that blended with the landscaping and wouldn’t disturb the natural environment.
The answer was a non-chlorinated natural pool that utilizes the purifying properties of plants and micro-organisms for cleaning. It’s a low-maintenance, chlorine-free alternative to traditional swimming pools, which are costly to maintain and require chemicals and filtration equipment in order to stay clean. Also known as natural ponds, no-chlorine pools have been around since the 1980s, when they began appearing at health spas in Austria and Germany. But it’s been only in the past five or so years that the pools have gained a foothold at European lodging facilities.
"My mother had read about them (natural pools) five or six years ago and gotten very excited about them," says Daniela Marini, who along with her sister Isabel helps her parents run the resort. "Even though a natural pool costs more initially, we knew that was the direction we wanted to take."
The Hotel Marini’s location on the sunny side of the Alps made the resort an ideal site for a natural pool. For the Marini family, avid gardeners with an intense love of nature who recently had expanded the hotel and its botanical gardens, the conversion made perfect sense.
Built by the Austrian-based company Biotop, the new pool occupies an area of 173 square metres. It consists of two zones: a central swimming area and a shallow surrounding area, or regeneration zone, with water lilies, reeds and assorted other natural vegetation specially chosen to purify the water. A small pump keeps the water circulating properly through the planted area, while a filter extracts leaves and other surface debris. Although it took two years of planning, the pool was built in just four weeks.
"Natural pools, unlike chlorinated ones, can be constructed even on slopes with extremely steep gradients," says Biotop’s Peter Petrich, who headed the project. "The 81 square-metre swimming zone and the 92 square-metre regeneration zone were quite straightforward, so we were able to build the pool very quickly."
Primarily as a result of the conversion, the resort has begun to attract a different sort of clientele, says Daniela. "Now that we have the natural pool, we’re seeing a lot of people who come just to enjoy nature and the relaxed environment. Our guests are really happy. It’s an amazing atmosphere, even for us, and we see it every day."
The Hotel Marini is not alone in its decision to ‘go natural’. The Scarlet, a 37-room luxury boutique hotel built to the highest eco-standards, opens this summer at Mawgan Porth, in North Cornwall, England. Constructed on the edge of a cliff, the hotel takes advantage of its dramatic setting to blend the boundaries between indoors and out, with a natural pool that will be topped off by rainwater.
In the U.S., when it comes to natural pools, the lodging industry has yet to get its feet wet. But that may soon change. Amelia Island Plantation is an ocean-front resort in north-east Florida that since its inception in 1971 has been lauded for its skillful blending of the luxurious and the natural. In 2008, in recognition of its green initiatives, the resort was awarded the Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s coveted Green Lodging destination certification.
Does that mean there may be a natural pool in the future? Resort spokesman Richard Goldman doesn’t rule it out. Says Goldman, "We would like to see even more aspects of our operation be natural and green. However, in order to meet the standards required of us we’ve yet to find a practical method of maintaining a natural pool. Nonetheless, we certainly intend to continue examining our options." |
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