Against the wall beside the pool table was a half-size refrigerator jammed with beer.
The room of restaurateur Michael Chow, best known for his eponymous restaurant chain Mr. Chow, shares a wall with his pool to create an aquarium effect.
The baseball stadium for the Arizona Diamondbacks has a swimming pool just beyond the centre-field wall.
"We now have a climbing wall and a bouldering wall next to the swimming pool, with a cafe and terrace overlooking Harlech Castle, " he said.
He was staying in Moscow to look for financiers for a business idea that would do for the Russian market what mortgage traders had done on Wall Street since the eighties: pool and repackage loans for investors in one massive turbine of debt and capital.
Now community company Harlech and Ardudwy Leisure, which runs the pool, has gone a step further with the wall and a refurbished cafe.
Yet it dipped into the same pool of subprime and other nontraditional mortgages that the GSEs and Wall Street were fishing in.
The 17-meter swimming pool is inside on the 24th floor but has an infinity-pool effect, as it sidles up to a glass exterior wall.
Pre-programmed cleaning cycles allow consumers to choose between floor-only cleaning or floor, wall and waterline cleaning, a necessary chore that many pool owners just don't want to do manually.
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Meanwhile, the curved ceiling of the main house captures the interplay of light refracted from the L-shaped pool, and the roof's louvered panels float above a wall of windows, perching on delicate wood columns as they shelter an outdoor patio.
Harlech and Ardudwy Leisure's plans include refurbishing the cafe at the pool, as well as the changing rooms, and building a climbing wall to attract more users.
Finance mavens who have made fortunes on Wall Street have always comprised a sizeable fraction of the buying pool, as have West Coasters hailing from the tech sector.
Companies outside the United States like to list on Wall Street for two main reasons: access to the large pool of American capital and the creation of a dollar-based stock that can be used to buy U.S. businesses.
FORBES: Why the world would be better off with one big stock market.
Over the last few years Wall Street has poured billions into film financing, creating a glut of new releases competing for a stagnant pool of moviegoers.
Its slow creeping against the wall reminded me that the world did in fact turn and that time was something other than the stagnant pool my life was draining into.
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