Perhaps some will recall one of the most beautiful interiors in Paris from Kieślowski's "Three Colours: Blue" with Juliette Binoche, and from "Amélie"

Perhaps some will recall one of the most beautiful interiors in Paris from Kieślowski's "Three Colours: Blue" with Juliette Binoche, and from "Amélie". This canary yellow belongs to the Piscine de la Butte-aux-Cailles... or rather, to the Pontoise swimming pool. The landmark Art Deco building stands in the Latin Quarter, a stone's throw from the Institut du Monde Arabe. The pool was built in 1933 by the architect Lucien Pollet, who also designed three other Parisian pools in the Art Deco aesthetic of the turn of the 1920s and 1930s.

The main hall is lit by a skylight 33 metres long, which floods the water with daylight. Around the perimeter the pool is ringed by two tiers of gallery-corridors, along which run rows of old individual changing cubicles with wooden doors. The walls are yellow, the decorative motifs blue, and mosaic geometric friezes adorn both the hall and the vestibule. Pollet commissioned the most fashionable decorators of the decade, among them those who had fitted out transatlantic liners; it is evidently to this experience that we owe the sense of being aboard an ocean liner.

In 2023 a restoration was completed, after which the building returned to its original appearance, from the mosaics and glass roof to the original shade of paint and the historic lettering in which the old-fashioned "Messieurs" and "Dames" are inscribed in place of "Hommes" and "Femmes".

The building is listed as a historic monument. In the evenings the pool is lit only by floodlights on its floor, so that the water glows from below, while through the glass skylight the moon and stars are visible. And yet Soviet Moscow, too, had beautiful swimming pools; perhaps one day they will be brought up to scratch as well.