Kelly Klein

Wednesday evening, Dennis Freedman, Nan Bush, Bruce Weber, Aerin Lauder Zinterhofer and Barneys New York hosted cocktails on the store’s third floor celebrating Kelly Klein’s new book Pools: Reflections. Something of a sequel to 1992’s Pools, her first meditation on the topic, the tome includes photographs of the structures by everyone from Bruce Weber and Helmut Newton to Tierney Gearon and Klein herself. Before she headed off to an intimate dinner at The Beatrice Inn with pals like Calvin Klein and Carolyn Murphy, we caught up with the author to discuss her aquatic obsession.

Your first book on pools came out 20 years ago. What made you decide to revisit the subject? Because swimming pools are very much a piece of architecture, a piece of sculpture, to me, that’s the way I see them. It’s as important as your house, your landscaping. And it never used to be. And twenty years had passed and I knew that there have been a lot of amazing pools built by amazing architects that were not in my first book and it was probably time.

Do you spend a lot of time in pools? I love to swim, but living in New York and East Hampton, I don’t have a pool.

You have two books about swimming pools and don’t have a pool in East Hampton? Well, I own one in Florida, but I don’t get to that house too much.

What’s the most divine pool you ever swam in? Gosh… that’s a really hard question. My favorites in the book, I think that there’s a whole movement in these cement pools that are built above ground, like horse or cattle troughs, they’re very sculptural from afar, they might just stick out in a paddock or in a field and they look really interesting. And then you walk to them and realize they’re just a real swimming pool. That’s the new movement.

Maybe your next favorite pool should be the one you build in East Hampton. Well, that would be nice. That’s a good idea. My son loves to swim, he’s a great swimmer. He’s almost five. He’s a fish, so he may require that I build a pool.

Click here to see excerpts from Pools: Reflections.

Photo: Billy Farrell Agency