Art Near the Pool and the Indoor Outdoor Room
The sliding wall that opens the family room onto the patio is one of the best things about living here. It is also the situation I get asked about most nervously, right after the bathroom question.
Here is what actually matters and what does not.
Chlorine, which matters less than people think
A pool twenty feet away across an open patio is not doing meaningful damage to a painting inside your house. Outdoor air moves, and the concentration simply is not there.
Where it does matter is an enclosed or partly enclosed pool room, or a spa indoors. That is a genuinely corrosive environment and I would not put original work in it. Nor would I put anything with metal leaf or exposed metal anywhere near an indoor spa, because that is where you see it first.
The thing that actually matters
The swing. When that wall is open for six hours on a spring afternoon, the room is outdoors. Temperature and humidity go wherever the day is going.
Then you close it and the air conditioning brings everything back over the next hour. Do that a few hundred times a year and the piece on that wall has lived through a lot more movement than a piece two rooms away.
It is not catastrophic. It just means the wall closest to the opening is the hardest wall in the room, and it should not hold the piece you care about most.
Where the safe walls are
The further from the opening, the better. The wall perpendicular to the slider, facing across the room rather than out at the patio, is usually excellent.
Anything on the interior side of the room, away from the moving air, is fine and behaves like any other wall in the house.
And the wall directly beside the opening, the one that gets full sun when the door is open and full outdoor humidity every afternoon, is the one I would use for a mirror or something sculptural instead.
Glare, since this is the bright end of the house
Indoor outdoor rooms are usually the brightest rooms in a Valley home, with light coming from the pool surface as well as the sky. Water bounces a surprising amount of light upward.
Unglazed textured work handles this much better than anything framed under glass, which turns into a mirror in these conditions. If a piece must be under glass, non reflective conservation glazing is worth every dollar here.
What works beautifully in these rooms
Surfaces with real relief. Because the light in an indoor outdoor room changes constantly, a piece with physical texture is doing something different every hour rather than sitting flat.
It is genuinely one of the best arguments for material work over a printed image, and you notice it within a day of living with it.
If you have one of these rooms and you are not sure which wall to use, send me a photo of it with the door open. That one photo tells me almost everything.
Warmly,
Dani
