Thermal Ledge vs. Baja Shelf vs. Sun Shelf
For many years, the popular appeal of creating shallow, multipurpose areas within swimming pools has been growing. These spaces are great for just getting your feet wet or, on hot days, for laying partially submerged in cooling water while risking excessive exposure to ultraviolet radiation.
I’ve see some of these features onto which lounges and chairs have been placed, aided and abetted by the deployment of sleeves that securely hold umbrellas: Seems like a ridiculously pleasant place to spend time around the water.
As might be expected, the watershaping industry has come up with multiple terms to describe these details — thermal ledges, Baja shelves, sun shelves, basking benches and lounging shelves among them. And it’s such a new addition to the design lexicon that I’m certain there are lots of other terms that haven’t yet reached my attentive ears.
I’d like to think this is a case where we can jump in early and help the industry avoid terminological trouble, so let me offer a running commentary on the possibilities I’ve heard and offer my candidate for filling what seems to be an increasingly important job.
I will dismiss Baja shelf out of hand. It’s not that I don’t like Baja; rather, it’s the fact that the word is associated with so many watershape-related products that it sounds like a marketing term and is therefore too limiting for our purposes.
Sun shelf almost works, but it seems to me to describe something out of and away from the water rather than in it — not the sort of possible confusion I’d want such a term to evoke. (Lounge shelf has pretty much the same problem.) Basking bench has alliteration going for it, which helps, but basking is too much associated with walruses to ring the bell for me.
This brings me around to the word thermal, which, like the word sun, implies that this special area is one in which the sun increases the temperature of water as a result of its minimal depth. That heating effect may or may not take place (depending upon how efficient the circulation system is and whether it happens to be on when the shelf is occupied), but no matter: It gets the point across in an appealing way.
To make things more useful, beyond using the word thermal, I would argue for flexibility in its associated word to suit the detail’s immediate descriptive need. This is why I suggest:
Thermal Bench (or Step or Ledge or Shelf) — a design detail in which a portion of a pool shell rises to within a few inches of the waterline to serve as a shallow bathing or lounging area.
I welcome your suggestions and comments with respect to this definition.