When it comes to your swimming pool design, varied geometries, materials and plantings can be used to create the style that suits you—from the most dramatic play of water to the most fun playing in the water. Usually designed by a landscape architect who manages the construction and oversees all the details and nuances, swimming pools come in all shapes and sizes. A water work of art, a cocktail
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Swimming Pools
Swimming pools complete and enhance a great landscape design
Within a landscape design plan, the biggest, and often the most impressive, hardscape is a luxury swimming pool. Equal parts lifestyle, enjoyment and elegance, a luxury swimming pool is the choice of a homeowner whose goal is to maximize leisure time and to create a backyard retreat or family center. Luxury swimming pools are technically and artistically sophisticated, conceptually exciting and one of a kind—thus helping to further distinguish the overall property from all others.
Why Have a Luxury Swimming Pool?
A luxury swimming pool is a necessity for any upscale home. It finishes off the design of the house because it is a natural extension of your indoor living space. When it comes time to sell your home, it is an expected amenity. Additionally, luxury swimming pools and high end landscaping are great for entertaining, formal or informal, adults or children. They provide healthful exercise; swimming has long been recognized as one of the kinder activities on joints and ligaments. In the Houston landscape, they provide a natural place to cool off during our long summer season. In other words—good for your home, good for you and good for fun.
You May Ask Yourself
Following are some of the issues involved in designing a luxury swimming pool—in consideration of both present and future value:
- How do you and your family plan to use the pool? For instance, daily use or mainly for entertaining? Are you planning to swim laps or will it be a play pool for children? Remember when answering these questions that it is OK to have a pool just for the visual pleasure.
- What is the pool’s connection to the rest of space? You will want to work with a landscape architect or landscape designer to ensure that all areas, such as a outdoor kitchen or outdoor water fountain, integrate seamlessly with the pool. You want it to respond to the existing context.
- What add-ons do you want? These options include a spa, sun shelf (a specially built feature for sunning), and underwater benches. Other elements: waterfalls, negative edges, slides, diving boards.
- Overall depth. This factor is primarily determined by how you plan to use the pool.
- Do you want it heated?
- Salt systems. There are pros and cons to this popular choice. Jeff Halper with Exterior Worlds says, “The main thing to remember is that you need to be aware of your surrounding material choices if you use a salt system. Salt has a corrosive effect and soft decking material can deteriorate due to it.”
- Landscape lighting options. Luxury swimming pools innately welcome dramatic outdoor lighting.
- Maintenance. Swimming pools need regular maintenance. Your landscape architect or landscape designer will be able to refer you to a quality pool service company.
- Most importantly: safety. All choices about a pool should factor in safety. One way to do it so is through the use of fences. Halper points out that they can be used in a non-intrusive way. “We like to hide fences and gates by weaving them among shrubbery. This method makes the pool area safe, up to code and aesthetically pleasing,” he says.
Finish It Off
Designed by an architect who manages the construction and oversees all the details and nuances, luxury swimming pools come in all sizes—a cocktail pool, a lagoon pool or a water work of art. You can use varied geometries, materials and plantings to create the most sophisticated environment for your luxury swimming pool.
Quality swimming pool finishes include:
Two For One
Luxury swimming pools are an excellent place to work in an outdoor water fountain. For one thing, the maintenance of an additional body of water is completely eliminated by having both elements connected. Some of the necessary equipment to have a stand-alone fountain, such as the chlorinator, auto-fills for water, lights and filters, are redundant and therefore not needed. Finally, in general, swimming pools tend to be a reasonably large body of water which is an asset to outdoor water fountains because it mitigates the problem that stand-alone water fountains tend to have with water loss due to evaporation and splashing.
Let the pros at Exterior Worlds guide you through the process of adding a luxury swimming pool to your landscape; call 713-827-2255.
For more the 20 years Exterior Worlds has specialized in servicing many of Houston’s fine neighborhoods.
Pool Landscaping
Houston pool landscaping begins, obviously, with the pool. Within a landscape design plan, a swimming pool is the biggest, and often the most impressive, hardscape. Equal parts lifestyle, enjoyment and elegance, a swimming pool is the choice of a homeowner whose goal is to maximize leisure time and to create a backyard retreat or family fun center.
Houston Pool Landscaping: Questions to Answer
• What add-ons do you want? These options
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Custom Swimming Pools
Exterior Worlds defines the term “custom swimming pool” in a slightly different manner than other companies do. In our definition, a custom swimming pool is a pool that is designed specifically to fit the landscape, the home, and the people for whom it is built. In all forthrightness to all who consider our services, this also means a greater financial investment than one would make by going directly to a
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Pool and Patio
The relationship between the pool and patio begins with a relationship of duality that unfolds in multiple dimensions throughout the remainder of outdoor space. A key determinant in the effectiveness of pool and patio design is the complimentary function these two structures serve as compliments to home architecture. Respect to home architecture places both the size and shape of the pool in its proper perspective in proportion to the rest
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Reflecting Pool
A reflecting pool is a geometrically proportional, shallow pond characterized by an exceptionally calm and tranquil surface. It is typically built near a manmade structure or landscape element so that its mirror-like surface can reflect and magnify adjacent forms. It can be constructed in the middle of a garden, in the center of a courtyard, at the end of a yard, or as the focal point of a seating area
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Small Pools
Small pools by Exterior Worlds are ideal for crowded neighborhoods with very small lots and limited space for landscaping. While many of these lots may have very large houses standing on them, they have little room in the backyard. Other lots may have patio homes or townhomes that feature a predominantly backyard landscape design characterized mostly by custom hardscapes.
Garden designs must be developed around these structures and be installed
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Infinity Pools
An infinity pool is a water feature with a negative edge. It can be built as a swimming pool, a decorative pond, or a simple reflecting pool. The negative edge is also known as a disappearing edge or zero edge. This is because it has no retaining wall or coping to contain the water. Water simply flows over its side and vanishes into an indeterminate point beyond—as if it
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Cocktail Pool
Cocktail pools are small and shallow pools that allows people to walk around the entire bottom. This creates the feeling of being in something of a tropical bar, waist deep in water, where hors d’oeuvres and drinks can be enjoyed in a wet suit in the sun, in the shade, or under the stars and lights of an illuminated aquatic environment.
Cocktail pools can be built in any number
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Contemporary Swimming Pool
The contemporary swimming pool represents one of the most important elements in a contemporary landscape design. Because the entire essence of contemporary aesthetic depends on the abstract realm, the unique properties of water prove ideal for its use in such a setting. Water represents the foundation of life and what many people call Spirit, yet it is inorganic in and of itself and definitely material in its visible constitution.
The
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Lap Swimming Pool
Many Houstonians are very athletic and want a landscape design plan that reflects their passions for sports. Such a plan would include, among other things, a multi-purpose backyard sports court and a lap swimming pool. Whereas a sports court can be customized to provide exercise for any number of individual and team sports, a pool dedicated exclusively to high-speed swimming gives the family a specialize form of exercise that only
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