Dower House - UK

Swimming in splendour

Situated in the heart of the Garden of England, Kent, The Dower House is a beautiful Victorian style country house with extensive grounds. In total, the property’s 27.8 acres encompass a picturesque lily covered lake with summer house and a large woodland area. It’s a wonderful setting with butterflies and bumblebees abound in the pretty formal gardens immediately surrounding the house.

Externally very traditional in appearance, the house conceals several interesting features including underground garages for the owner’s classic sports car collection and a home cinema and games room. The property’s show-piece though, is its stunning indoor swimming pool. Approximately 12x10m in area, this Greek architecture themed space fuses high-end finishes, floods of natural light and stunning views onto the surrounding gardens.

The ceiling of the pool features a central skylight and beautiful coffers finished in a high gloss, rubberised paint requiring the underlying plasterboard construction and plaster finish to be absolutely flat and smooth.

The owners wanted to incorporate an audio and video entertainment system in the pool area creating a social space for family and friends to enjoy music, movies and TV. However it was equally important that any technology introduced created as little visual intrusion as possible in order to maintain the aesthetic effect so painstakingly created.

To that end they enlisted the help of specialist AV installer Circle Automation to integrate a system. James Major of Circle Automation was aware of Amina’s invisible loudspeakers and deemed them the ideal solution due to their ability to be fully skimmed over with plaster. This was vital if the ceiling finish was to achieve the level of flatness required. A further benefit of using Amina is their excellent ability to use reflected sound in a room to positive effect. In highly reflective rooms like a swimming pool, this trait, which is unique to DMLs (distributed mode loudspeakers), helps maximise sound quality in what are quite often difficult spaces acoustically.

It was decided that the ideal solution to fill the space with high quality sound was a surround sound system comprising of five Amina AIW550E speakers. Three speakers (Front Left, Right and Centre channels) were positioned at one end of the pool area directly above the flush mounted TV. The two rear channel speakers sit at the other end directly above the Jacuzzi.

Whether the system is used for subtle background music whilst enjoying a relaxing morning swim, entertaining the family as they enjoy a movie in full surround sound, or an evening party with everyone’s favourite songs playing aloud – the result is the same: high quality sound and a high quality atmosphere.