Pooled resources: A moving and powerful space has been created within the outbuildings of an Irish country house.

The new swimming pool in the outbuildings of a large farm house at Carrigacunna in County Cork, Ireland has been made with great simplicity. The Victorian stables were gutted down to their random rubble walls, an intermediate floor was inserted and the roof was reslated at the original pitch. The resulting volume, with its original openings preserved and reglazed, and complemented by a new horizontal slit in the north wall, has become a luminous and slightly awe-inspiring space. By using the in-situ concrete pool tank to tie the original structure together, water could be brought to the base of the existing walls, so the whole volume has a sensuous integrity rarely encountered in such conversions. A new enclosed stair rises from the house to pool level, which because of the slope of site is some 2m above living rooms of the house -- in fact at first floor level of the old stables. The staircase link is clad in glass and large grey ceramic tiles, chosen to relate to the austerity and colour of the original stone walls and slate roofs.

Light spills into the pool from a new glazed gallery, 3m wide, which runs along the whole south side of the old stable block in an original court, which has again been stripped to essentials -- the random rubble walls and their enclosed space. The floor has been reduced to a strip of austere pebbled garden with stepping stones and a parallel garden pool. The three strips, glazed gallery, pebbles and outdoor pool work together to reflect continuously changing light into the enclosed swimming pool hall through the glass wall of the gallery.

In the pool hall, the random stone is masked with external quality render, and the ceiling is in a slightly polished variant of the same. The gallery is paved with Irish blue limestone and, here, the rubble walls are exposed. The combination of light and water, their reflections and sounds, their languorous sensuality inevitably recalls, on a much smaller scale, Peter Zumthor's marvellous baths at Vals in Switzerland (AR August 1997). Zumthor too was working with an existing building, but you never see it in the photographs because its routine 1960s towers are so incongruous compared with Zumthor's caverns. At Carrigacunna the new work, while providing a splendid new space, is entirely at home in the informal country house.