For professionals
A pool contractor built for your programme.
Since 1973 Curtis Pools has built gunite pools inside other people’s projects — on live school campuses, in hotels that never close, and three floors up on a concrete deck. Send us the drawings and we will price and programme the pool.
Pictured
School aquatic centre, Cape Town
Water polo · 2024 · Base Projects as main contractor
The pool is one line on your programme. We keep it that way.
Most of our commercial work happens while a main contractor is building around us: a school being extended, a hotel with guests in it, a courtyard pool on the third floor. We know what a pool needs from the rest of the build — and what the rest of the build needs from the pool.
Send us your drawingsScope
What we take off your plate
01
Structural gunite shells
Steel-reinforced, sprayed-concrete shells to your drawings — any shape, raised or sunken, on grade or on a suspended slab. Shell-only for another contractor to finish, if that is how the job is let.
02
Complete pools
Shell, coping, mosaics, marbelite interior, racing lines and paving — all by our own crews, with the build photographed at every stage. Piping and the filtration plant are installed complete by us, into a plant room built by the main contractor. Starting blocks and accessories are supplied by others and installed by us.
03
Competition, polo & learn-to-swim
25 m lane pools with starting blocks and lane tiling, 2 m-deep water polo pools, and warm learn-to-swim pools with heat pumps and covers — outdoors, or indoors under a hall roof.
04
Water features & lakes
Reflection lakes, statue fountains, rock streams and natural ponds with biofilters — from a hotel plaza to 7 000 m² of water through an office park.
05
Work in occupied buildings
Renovations and refinishing in resorts and estates that stay open: cordoned work areas, noise kept to agreed hours, and a four-week programme when that is what the gym allows.
06
Industrial gunite
Mesh-reinforced gunite where it is the right answer beyond pools: re-lining scour-damaged stormwater culverts, and stabilising cut slopes.
On site
How we fit into a building programme
01
Drawings first
Send the architect’s or engineer’s drawings and we price from them. Where there are none yet, we come to site and draw the pool for the space.
02
Sequenced with the main contractor
At Skye College the pool went in before the new buildings closed the access — after which only a wheelbarrow fitted through. We plan around those windows.
03
Difficult ground and high decks
On dolomite we cast beams under the shell with agricultural drains beneath. On a deck, the compressor stays at ground level with the air piped up and the materials spread to keep the load down.
04
Watertight from the first fill
A rooftop shell has nothing below it but a shop. Our shells are built to hold water from the day they are filled, and the build is photographed so the record goes into your file.
Case in point
Pool shells eight floors up, for another contractor.
At The Houghton the gunite shells for the penthouse pools were built eight to nine floors up between July and November 2012, with the materials spread across the deck to keep the load down and compressed air piped up from the ground.
At Fire & Ice, Melrose Arch, the hotel’s courtyard pool shell went in three floors above the shops in 2009 — gunite machines on the deck, the compressor at street level, and a shell that had to be watertight from the first fill.
The Houghton penthouse poolsSelected work
Projects delivered alongside other contractors
Track record
Firms we have worked alongside
Architects, QSs & developers
SNA Architects
Skye Architects
BPAS Architects
Townsend Architects
QS Consult
Equate Group
Questcost QS
HB Realty
Africrest Properties
Main contractors
Van der Linde Venter
Astek
Farquharson Projects
Stefanutti Stocks
Base Projects
GD Irons
Tyris Construction
Central Developments
Grinaker-Aveng
Group Five
1973
Fifty years of gunite and marbelite under one family name — and a client list of schools, resorts and corporates to match.
25 × 30 m
The Cape Town aquatic centre: an indoor water polo pool with eight heat pumps, delivered with Base Projects as main contractor in about five months.
NSPI
Judged by the industry itself: Gold and Silver awards for gunite pools and water features, a Silver for a public school pool, and a Gauteng Pool of the Year.
Have an upcoming project?
Send us your drawings.
Email the drawings and a brief to sales@curtispools.co.za, or use the contact form and we will call you back. You will get a price, a programme and straight answers about what the site will let us do.