And high-end companies say customers can pay as much as $5,000 a month for weekly cleanings and maintenance. The fish themselves can cost hundreds of dollars each or more (at the top end, a masked angelfish can cost as much as $15,000). The initial installation and setup is only part of what aquarium owners can expect to pay. (They eat sushi-grade seaweed, shrimp and krill.) Atkins said he spent about $125,000 on the aquarium and accompanying equipment.

“It’s like living art,” said Atkins, who said he enjoys feeding the fish himself. The tank is filled with synthetic coral and a colorful mix of tropical fish such as queen angels, parrotfish and cowfish.

The setup ensures that the tank operates silently in the living room. Outside, there’s another 400-gallon tank for water changes. From there, saltwater gets filtered and pumped through six different pipelines built into the floors. Next, they retrofitted a basement space originally used as a wine closet into a filtration room with about a 300-gallon capacity. Atkins said the crew slept at his house a couple of nights, pulling all-nighters to get the tank installed on time.įirst, a contractor had to install steel reinforcement into the floors to handle the 20,000 pounds of weight - water is heavy. “Then it was like, ‘How do we fit a tank in?’ ” “I bought this house kind of on a whim because it’s on a corner lot on an island,” said Atkins. Retrofitting the tank into an existing home was a challenge. With many affluent Americans upsizing or relocating, aquarium designers say a good part of the demand is coming from repeat customers upgrading their sea life’s home as they upgrade the human home that surrounds it. Some of these aquariums rival installations at public aquariums in size and scale. The company is fully booked into the third quarter of 2022. In more typical times, he would install a high-end home aquarium every few months - now he’s doing multiple aquariums every month. Clients who may have long wanted to splurge on a home aquarium were stuck at home and were finally willing to take the plunge, he said. He said demand has grown by about 400 percent since the start of the pandemic and is still going strong.

“We’ve seen a tremendous boom in business,” said Nic Tiemens, of Infinity Aquarium Design in Los Angeles. Something of a cross between home decor, entertainment, wildlife and pet shelter, these custom aquariums can weigh more than 75,000 pounds and cost as much as $750,000 at the top end. Others took up a more elaborate pet hobby: luxury home aquariums. Stuck at home during the pandemic, many Americans took in dogs or cats.

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