A small studio that
builds slowly.

Retreat Pools started in 2009 with one pool in Tallebudgera Valley and two people who were tired of watching good designs get lost between the drawing and the dig. Seventeen years and 180 pools later, the studio is still small on purpose.

A concreter and a landscape architect

Tom Hollis spent the first part of his career pouring structural concrete on Gold Coast towers. Claire Ashdown was drawing gardens for architects who kept asking who could build the pools she sketched. They started Retreat to answer that question themselves: one studio that designs the pool, engineers the shell, builds it with its own crew and plants the garden around it.

That is still how we work. The person who draws your pool sits in the same studio as the person who sets out the steel, and both of them will stand on your site before anything is priced. It is slower than the alternative. It is also why the pool on the drawing is the pool you swim in.

Why twelve pools a year

Twelve is the number of builds a director can run without handing the detail to someone else. It lets us stagger excavation, steel and shotcrete across the year, keep the same crew together from job to job, and never rush a cure to free up a pump truck.

It also means we turn work away. If the year is full, we tell you when the next opening is rather than squeeze you in and stretch everyone thin.

What a director on site means

Every week of every build, Tom, James or Luke walks your site. They check the steel against the engineer’s drawings before the pour, sight the levels before the coping goes down and sign off each stage before the next trade starts. You have their mobile number from day one, and the person who answers is the person who made the decision.

When the pool is finished we come back after a year to check it again. Most of our new work now comes from those clients, and from the architects and builders they introduced us to. That record matters more to us than any award.