Paolo Benedetti has built a reputation as a thought leader in the field of Pool construction. As the President of Aquatic Technology in Morgan Hill, CA, Benedetti has worked on his fair share of luxury pools and spas. In addition to running a successful pool construction firm, he splits his time as an educator and expert witness. Consequently, he’s become one of the most well-regarded technical experts working in the industry today.

Recently we had the chance to catch up with Benedetti while he was teaching a class for Watershape University at the Everything Under The Sun Expo. Always giving of his time and expertise, we met before he was scheduled to teach a packed classroom of pool builders who had come to Orlando to learn from one of the masters.

Read Our One-On-One Interview With Paolo Benedetti:

Pool Magazine (PM): Can you give our readers a bit of background and information about how you first got started in the swimming pool industry?

Paolo Benedetti (PB): I had a contractors license already and bought a pool service company from a guy that was retiring. So I instantly kind of fell into 300 accounts in the Silicon Valley area. Some of the service company clients wanted to have their pool remodeled, so I went and got my C53.

I had a general contractor’s license at that point because I was helping my dad. We were flipping houses back and forth. So getting into the pool remodeling side was pretty easy. I started out by doing a couple of tile jobs and some coping and plaster jobs as well as a couple of replumbs. I liked that aspect of the industry a lot more. Realizing as we were doing some of these remodels, that the original construction was definitely substandard, I started kind of formulating my plan to get into pool construction.

PM: What was the very first pool you built?

PB: The first pool I built was in 1995. That was a $350,000 perimeter overflow pool. I sold the job and then it was a challenge to figure out how to do it. That’s how I hooked up with Genesis to begin with. They just taught the very first class down in Morro Bay. My engineer heard about it and he recommended it to me and said “You’ve got to go to this pool school that this guy just set up on infrastructure. There’s nothing else like it in the industry. I went there and actually hired Skip Phillips to kind of mentor me through my first project.

Shortly thereafter, they realized that I had some skill sets to offer to their program and I started teaching with Genesis a couple of years after that. That’s kind of what started my educational journey of giving back to the industry.

That first pool was for one of the founders of a big semiconductor firm in Silicon Valley. We ended up finishing that pool in about eight months. Afterwards, my wife and I were invited to a black-tie cocktail party at their house. The principals of Intel were there and it was really just a who’s who of Silicon Valley on the guest list.

I was watching all the guys out around the pool where we had installed the very first two laminars from Crystal Fountains. We had actually the betas, and we used them on that job. Well none of these guys had ever seen laminar fountains before that night and here’s this pool with these glowing green streams. They were standing out there in Tuxedos, straddling the stream, pretending they were peeing. It was the funniest thing you ever saw. Man, I wish I had a camera back then but this was way before smartphones. We were a hit. I handed out probably a couple of dozen business cards of that cocktail party, and there was no looking back.

PM: Sounds like your career kind of snowballed from there.

PB: It did! We decided from there we were going to start divesting ourselves as a pool service company and started focusing more on construction. Now, we pretty much average anywhere from four to six projects at one time because they take sometimes more than a year to build.

Because of my general contractor license, I was able to do things that the normal pool contractor wasn’t licensed to do. We could do hillside infinity pools, hardscapes, and outdoor kitchens. So that was kind of where I landed, was in that high-end market just right off the bat. As my network of clients evolved we really started branching out.

PM: Yeah, you travel all over the world now building pools and are really racking up the frequent flyer miles.

PB: Exactly. Right away people were asking me, would you mind taking over this project in Montana? Would you mind doing this project in Hawaii? We were kind of starting to travel all over to deal with projects.

My friends in college think it’s really glamorous because I get to travel all over the place. Truth be told, it’s actually kind of boring because you’re traveling by yourself. You’re eating meals by yourself. It can get a little lonely at times.

I started another company called Luxury Environments, which I don’t advertise. I’ve got a Facebook page, but we don’t really promote it too much. I’ve been doing this for about seven or eight years; representing high-net-worth individuals that are building vacation homes. How that got started is I was doing a project for a family about 15 years ago, and they were building a 10,000-square-foot cabana behind their house. They ended up firing the general contractor because they thought he was padding the bills. Anyway, they asked me if I would kind of, like, manage things, and if I’d step up and finish it. I worked out a deal with them, and then from there, I kind of became their go-to. Whenever they were building something, they would ask me if I would be their owner’s rep on the job, like a direct contractor. That’s how I got into construction management for those high-net-worth individuals. Once you pull off one of those for somebody, they want you to do it again and again and again.

PM: In the field of pool design and construction, there was no Ivy League university for you to attend to learn at the time. You must have learned a lot on your own.

PB: I did, and no, there really wasn’t. A lot of it was developing some of the techniques kind of on my own. I’m trying to take that knowledge and put it back into the industry though. This morning I’m teaching a class on grade beams. Been doing them for years and I think builders will learn a lot.

PM: Well, you’ve been called one of the best designers in the industry and you’re a mentor to maybe hundreds, if not thousands of builders.

PB: I like to pride myself on my accessibility. People call me all the time, and say ‘I took your construction class and I’ve got a question about something’. So I’m more than happy to mentor people. In a couple of weeks, I’m going back to North Carolina to mentor a guy who’s doing his first knife edge pool.

I kind of fell into a very modern, clean, and contemporary style, which I think is probably one of the most difficult architectural styles to build. My projects are usually architecturally integrated with the home. It’s usually one and the same with a free-flowing, kind of indoor-outdoor lifestyle where it’s really a seamless transition between the architecture of the inside of the home and outside living space.

PM: That’s really what high-end homeowners want.

PB: Yes, exactly. So I don’t like that if you build a house and then you did this crazy thing in the backyard. I could do those but it would just look tacked on. I’m not one of those guys who if a client wants to do a fire feature, I’m not going to go through a catalog and pick something that’s in distribution. We’re going to go have something custom-made for that job.

PM: This latest project that we’re going to highlight in Pool magazine has some of those elements that we were talking about, where the backyard itself has this dramatic kind of elevation.

PB: Yeah, it had a very dramatic slope. Originally they came to me and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this hillside. We want to put a pool on it.’ So we said absolutely. We ended up building the pool on top of an extension of the foundation of the home.

PM: What we really love is how amazing this pool looks day or night.

PB: It’s really cool yeah. During the design phase, the client was really concerned about color. The only way that I can guarantee somebody that the pool is going to have a particular color is tile. We ended up choosing tile out of Canada, a fused glass from Interstyle. What’s neat about them is they have a myriad of colors and textures. So they’ve got probably eight or ten different textures from little wavy surfaces to little bumps. They’ve got all kinds of surface variations that you can get.

PM: The lighting on this pool is incredible, too. We love the starfield kind of look and feel that you managed to achieve.

PB: Thanks. The fiberoptic starfield on that project was the first time I’ve done one in a glass tile pool. We didn’t want to have to drill holes in the glass tile, so we had to come up with a methodology of being able to align the fibers to come up between the grout joints of the tile.

My tile guys were very patient. We obviously complicated things for them extra with dealing with the starfield. We had 300 little fiber optics coming out of the floor so as they were setting the sheets of tile we were pulling the fibers through the grout joint and then going back and detailing between the tiles with the thin set being careful not to damage the fiber optics.

PM: We’re getting to the point in our conversation where we’d like to switch gears a bit and talk about your expert witness role in the industry. What is it that you do in this capacity?

PB: I don’t really pick sides. I do tend to represent property owners more than I represent pool builders, but I do periodically have builders call and say, ‘Hey, look, I’m being sued. I need you to come help me out’.

One of the things you need to understand is there are a number of expert witnesses in the pool industry who are basically hired guns. There is a phrase ‘You can pay an expert to say almost anything’. Flat out, if somebody hires me, I tell them straight up front, I’m going to tell the truth. Really what an expert witness is supposed to do is speak the facts and nothing but the facts. Facts aren’t malleable and neither is the truth.

PM: You must see a lot. We’ve seen some awful examples in your social feed or shovel-crete and pools with substandard steel.

PB: You name it, I’ve seen it. A lot of these builders are doing their own engineering and don’t have a professional engineer working for them. They don’t understand why setting the drains high above the steel and then filling the shotcrete up to the sump affects their steel-to-concrete ratios. So they’ve got a twelve-inch thick floor now.

PM: Is that why you got into education? It seems like you’re passionate about teaching folks how to correct these types of flaws.

PB: Really the primary motivation is I want people to learn what they don’t know. Unfortunately for the pool industry, many are kind of led around by the subcontractors. A lot of pool contractors do things a certain way because it’s the way they’ve always done it which may not necessarily be the correct way.

From being an authority in the field of pool construction, to an educator, to an expert witness, there are many facets to Paolo Benedetti. One thing is absolutely certain, his passion lies in innovation. He’s made it his mission to elevate the profession through teaching and applying the proper techniques. Always giving of his time and eager to share his wealth of knowledge and experience, Benedetti’s hard work has captured the respect and admiration of his peers throughout the industry.

Featured Photo Credit: Jimi Smith Photography

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