n January, Greg Smith found himself knocking on the door of a warehouse in Austin, Texas. The young man who answered asked the co-partner of Liquid Assets to sign a confidentiality agreement.
Minutes later, Smith was inside the set that was to be home to “The Real World: Austin.” He was then asked to design the first pool for the popular MTV series.
Never having seen the show, Smith asked to view a previous episode. “I watched from one commercial break to the next and realized it’s a soap opera for young adults,” he recalls. “So that night, I designed a ‘sex pool’ with benches and several well-positioned vertical jets that would stimulate.
“When I explained what I had in mind for this pool to the producers, they loved the idea,” he adds.
The rectangular, shallow pool is only 200 square feet, with a raised, cantilevered deck and Leuderstone coping. It sits inside the basement of the home atop 4,800 bags of rock, but emerges through the living room floor.
In addition, Smith fitted the pool with an underwater camera, which proved enticing to the show’s participants. “The kids enjoyed it, and they got rowdy and had parties. Half of the footage they shot in the pool couldn’t be shown on TV,” he says.
“The Real World: Austin” began airing on MTV in June and runs until February 2006.
