Custom pools, spas and pool houses — with the decking, structures and planting around them drawn and delivered as one project rather than three.

A pool is the most expensive thing most properties will ever put in the ground, and the element least tolerant of being got wrong. It sets the level of everything around it, it fixes where the afternoon sun lands on the terrace, and once the shell is in, nothing about its position is negotiable.

It is also why people call us with the whole backyard in mind rather than a single item. A pool that arrives before the grading, the drainage, the deck material and the screen planting have been resolved ends up sitting in a yard rather than in a garden. We plan the pool and the property it belongs to on the same drawing, at the same time.

Siting and water shape

Where the pool goes is the decision everything else inherits. Sun through the day, the prevailing wind, the view from the rooms that open onto it, how far someone walks from the door, and the grade you actually have. Long rectilinear water reads as architecture against a contemporary house; a softer figure suits an older property. This gets settled at design stage, alongside the terrace and the planting, rather than staked out on the day.

Structure and engineering

Colorado soils and freeze-thaw are unforgiving of a shell that was not engineered for them. Steel is placed and inspected, the structure is sized against the soil and the water load, and plumbing is set and pressure-tested before anything is covered over. It is the work nobody ever sees, and the reason a pool is still tight in year fifteen.

Spas and spillways

A raised spa extends the pool by months at either end of the year, and the spillway between the two is what makes the whole thing audible from the terrace. Weir detail is unforgiving of a few millimetres out of level — the difference between water sheeting cleanly and water running in threads — so the edge is set and checked rather than trusted.

Decks, coping and surrounds

The deck is the surface people stand on barefoot in August, so how hot it gets and how it behaves wet matter more than how it photographs. Large-format porcelain, dimensional stone and cut flagstone each behave differently on both counts. Coping sets the line of the water and is the first edge the eye reads, so it is detailed against the pool rather than ordered to match the paving.

Pool houses and covered structures

Shade, changing, storage, and somewhere for the equipment to live out of sight and earshot. A structure sized against the house rather than against the pool keeps the composition reading as architecture instead of as an outbuilding. Cabanas, covered terraces and pergolas are resolved in the same drawing set as the pool so the roof line and the water line agree.

Equipment, heating and winterisation

Circulation and heating sized to the volume rather than to the smallest unit that will move it, and equipment sited where it can actually be serviced. Every pool and spa is detailed to be drained, blown down and shut properly before the first hard freeze — the single maintenance event that decides whether spring opening is routine or expensive.