Pooling Resources

Sometimes, a rekindled idea is simply another facet of sustainability. That happened two decades ago when San Francisco architect Olle Lundberg—renowned for creating striking steel, glass, and wood structures for high-profile clients like Oracle founder Larry Ellison—came across an old 14-foot-high water tank on a former cattle ranch.

“I knew it was functional and operational, so I took it, not really knowing what I would do with it,” he said. However, the old-growth redwood tank stirred memories of a 1963 sitcom called Petticoat Junction, where the ‘petticoat’ characters regularly took dips in a similar water tank beside a train junction. “If it worked for them, it should work for me,” Lundberg thought.

At his cabin near the Sonoma coast, he reassembled the 14-foot-high tank at the end of a deck that cantilevers above a sloping hillside, positioning the tank so that its top is now level with the deck. The 25-foot circle of water became the perfect plunge pool, placed beside a sauna and hot tub that were added later. The hillside was reinforced with retaining walls, and the tank now sits on new foundations designed to catch any overflows. A bio-filtered swimming pool this deep would have been prohibitively expensive, but the salvaged tank—and a long-forgotten TV show—made it all possible.