DESIGN by SJ POOLS AND LANDSCAPING
PHOTOGRAPHY by JIMI SMITH PHOTOGRAPHY
TEXT by DONNA ROLANDO
A longtime ago Kinnelon resident was inspired by family ski trips to Colorado to model a glass house after the resort area’s ultra-modern marvels and how they fit naturally into a mountainous terrain. This may sound like a pipe dream, but our homeowner is a builder who makes things happen. Not only did he bring in Berglund Architects from Edwards, Colorado, for their expertise in highlighting nature’s glory, but he also recognized the value of just the right setting.
Although it was a waiting game, the builder held out for a property worthy of the proposed five-bedroom home’s walls of windows. That’s a key feature of this glass-and-stone contemporary in Kinnelon’s gated Smoke Rise community, nestled in watershed woodlands that were once the hunting grounds for Lenni Lenape. Rocks ruled the roughly seven-acre site when he first saw it, but he could envision its potential.
At the Lake Kinnelon site, says the builder, “the property was beautiful and fit the house perfectly, with a 300-degree view of just water, and it sat on a peninsula. I’d had my eye on it for a couple of years, and finally he [the previous owner] accepted my offer in 2020.”
To take water views to the next level, however, an equally extravagant pool was to play a starring role. No need to search far and wide for a designer. Welington Gomes, owner/designer at Paramus-based SJ Pools and Landscaping LLC, could not resist the chance to pool his talents with the builder’s in creating the unforgettable.
“He [Gomes] wanted to do something he’d never done before, and I wanted to put in a pool that I hadn’t seen anywhere before, so we put our heads together and came up with a slice-of-pie-shaped pool with an infinity edge,” the builder explains.
The result? “When you walk into the house, the pool and the lake look like they’re connected,” he says, describing a reflective quality noted at the high-end resorts that inspired this project.
Gomes knew he was embarking on no easy task in 2020 as he began designing a perimeter overflow pool of about 1,100 square feet. “It’s pretty much the most complicated type of pool you can build,” he says, adding that “everything just looks like a mirror.” Imagine the splendor of sunrise and sunset reflected in calm, clear waters.
From the landscaped grassy yard nearer the lake, the pool, completed in August 2022, makes another spectacular display as water flows off the infinity edge into a basin some 18 feet below. The pool’s shape was chosen to maximize the infinity effect, “so that for most rooms of the house you can see the pool, the lake and the infinity edge,” says Gomes.
Besides transforming rocky terrain into a visual wonderland, the pool also takes center stage in outdoor living, joining the covered outdoor kitchen with stoneveneer fireplace and a 96-inch-long modern linear fire table (Archpot) planted in its location for the view. When they’re tired of making a splash, family and friends can lounge on the pool’s sun shelf or catch the game at the tequila bar.
No detail was overlooked. For instance, on sunny days, the pool gets a shimmer from the glass mixed with cement and stone in its Wet Edge plaster surface. A mirror of the infinity pool with its own sleek image, the mitered-edge rectangular hot tub gains its strength from Neolith, a sintered stone made from superheated raw material.
Deep-blue sandblasted marble (Marmiro Stones) is a non-slip blanket for the pool patio and extends inside the kitchen and Tulum-inspired tequila bar for a seamless effect. With collapsible doors that stay hidden when not in use, these rooms enjoy an “indoor/outdoor feeling” yet are fully protected from the elements, the kitchen sitting below the master-bedroom deck, explains Gomes.
When it’s party time, LED lighting livens the pool with color and resort-style speakers provide endless tunes in the soothing atmosphere of landscape illumination. While potted palm trees create a resort vibe, Gomes kept landscaping minimal—with shade and flowering trees, hydrangeas and grasses—so as not to compete with the house and its natural environs. In addition, artificial grass lends a soft touch to the stone patio and doubles as drainage.
As Instagram proves, when a builder and a pool designer join forces with one spectacular project in mind, expectations run high. “We were able to achieve something really incredible,” Gomes says, crediting teamwork. “Everything marries together. I designed the pool around his house, and he designed the house around the pool.”
See this and more fantastic New Jersey home tours in our June/July issue of NJ HOME.