Talk to Michael Logsdon, president, business development, of Land Design in Boerne, Texas, for a minute, and you can't miss his excitement for natural swimming pools. While he's yet to build one here in the States, he's teamed up with Europe-based BioNova, and continues to raise awareness about the pros of going au naturel.
"NSP or a biologically filled swimming pool is just what it says," says Logsdon. "It's like nature intended it. It's filtered with plant life. The filtration system is called a regeneration zone. It's basically just various deep-water areas, aquatic plants and different bog plants."
The natural pool can sometimes be a tough sell, notes Logsdon, thanks to its heftier price tag. The pool's regeneration zone is equivalent to the size of the pool, so, for example, a 450 square foot pool requires 900 square feet of space, and that can increase the price by many thousands of dollars.
Yet one of Logsdon biggest challenges is to get potential customers to understand that a natural pool is much like a traditional pool, just with a few tweaks.
"There are a lot of misconceptions about this. It can be built out of anything that a traditional pool can be built out of. All you are doing is filtering it with plant life. You can even have an automatic cleaner or robotic cleaners."
Aside from the obvious client - environmentally conscious people - Logsdon says people interested in plants, specifically aquatic plants, and water gardening are a perfect fit.
"You can meld the two together. It's unique, and people like unique stuff. They want something not everybody has. I find that this intrigues those people.
"It piques people's interest. It's something good for the industry because the industry gets a bad rap a lot of times, and this is something new."
