A luxury pool offers everyone who gathers around its lounge area a sustained impeccable moment of continuous comfort and joy.  It combines pure relaxation, recreation, conversation, and contemplation all into one unified structure that blends hardscapes, water, and surroundings garden design into a special sense of Houston outdoor living. 

This is the kind of luxury that you need to feel rather than brag about, and something that you will want to share with family, friends, and neighbors rather than promoting it as a symbol of status.  A luxury pool is meant to work for the landscape and with the landscape as it simultaneously serves the humanness of us all with a practical artistry that elevates the value of the living experience of each individual.

Due to the tendency that luxury pools have to elevate our sense of this seemingly elusive thing we call the quality of life, they are commonly designed to strike the eye with a visibly apparent elevation.  While it is not a constant for us, we often consequently build such a pool in two or even three levels.  These levels progressively become deeper as you pass through them, sometimes taking you to the next level with the movement of a waterfall, or at other times giving you the feeling of descent down a giant underwater staircase.  

Frequently, a multi-tiered luxury pool has a spa located at one end, although there are plenty of custom models that we create that center the spa along one of the sides.  These spas are carefully planned out as part of the swimming pool design built into the shell of the pool itself.  Silent pumps are used to keep the water circulating, and heaters are guarantee it stays warm at all times.  We also place controls in the spa so people can vary water temperature, flow, and the light that illuminates the water at night with a sense of experience that extends beyond mechanical amenities.

After we have completed the shell of the pool basin, it is necessary then for us to frame such a setting with a sense of special surrounding.  This is done in three places: the coping, the patio, and the surrounding garden design. 

Simply put, a coping is the raised area that looks like a step that travels all around the edges of the pool.  It actually works as a step by making a person pause just for a split second as they walk toward the water.  Somehow, long ago, people discovered this was a safer and more comfortable way to get into a pool rather than just stepping off a sheer drop-off into however many feet of water was waiting for them. 

In public pools copings are nothing more than concrete strips of elevated hardscape that seems to say “dive here” to throngs of excited water-splashers.  We try to avoid setting this type of tone in residential landscape design—especially when building a luxury pool.  . 

Instead we give special attention the coping around the pool as an opportunity to mirror the architecture of the home.  There are all types of high-grade materials we can use to construct it that can create a clear and very visual correspondence to the rear edifice of the house.  The width and height of the coping matter too, because works as the first level of a visual frame lending symmetry and containment to the otherwise formless nature of water.

In a very real sense a custom patio does this as well, and once again, it also works to compliment the architecture of the home.  Fine patio work can be accomplished using any number of materials.  Depending on the landscape design that surrounds the patio, we may do something that looks very formal and geometric with flagstone or special geometrically shaped blocks sunk into the ground.  Or, we may create a deliberately irregular pattern that mimics natural stone formations and blends gently into the vegetation surrounding the pool. 

There are also ways to make the water itself in a luxury pool appear exceptional.  Special underwater lighting can shine from within the water, illuminating it from within in such a way that it appears multidimensional at night.  Water jets and waterfalls can create even more of an added sense of dimension and dynamic flow of life.