It’s now time to start designing your poolscape! Our design team has spent time onsite and in our office learning all about you, your family, and your existing yard. We have received your inspiration, developed the โ€œcanvasโ€ of your existing backyard, and are ready to get started on your customer swimming poolscape and backyard!

Pool Shapes. While no pool is exactly the same on a custom swimming pool design, all fall into three broad categories:

  • Freeform: Curvy free-flowing lines with intentional radial transition. Think of your favorite natural spring in the mountains or a lagoon in the tropics. These pools often are surrounded by materials like natural stones, boulders, and water features.
  • Geometric: Straight lines all around make for a modern swimming pool. A geometric pool can take on many shapes (not just rectangular), where geometry and spacing become our designerโ€™s best friend. Materials used for these pool styles are often more modern and incorporate concrete finishes, travertine stones, porcelains, and tiles.
  • Line and Tangent: These pools offer a mixture of straight lines and radius curves to outline the swimming pool and spa. They can take on a classic shape, like the well-known Roman-end swimming pool. However, some of the most contemporary award-winning designs today also successfully incorporate straight lines and meticulously placed radius curves in the watershape.ย 

Pool size, interior features, and materials

  • How big and deep will the pool be? To answer this, we consider your budget, how we defined its use during our previous discussions, and the available space in your yard.
  • With a defined pool style and size, we start to focus on the amenities of the pool. We identify items to suit our customerโ€™s ideal swimming pool experience, such as seating benches, beach entries, sun shelves (aka Shamoo ledges), step entries, swim-up bars, and custom bar stool seating.
  • We then discuss the interior finish of the pools. Believe it or not, many of the poolscapes we design can be built in vinyl or concrete. In concrete pools, our interiors are finished with a ceramic, porcelain, or glass tile line and an aggregate finish like PebbleTec. In vinyl-lined pools, there are an array of liner patterns available, from different manufacturers, such as Latham Pools.
  • And let’s not forget the importance of lighting and bubblers to create the ultimate swimming pool experience! Our lights are always intentionally placed to eliminate dark spots in the pool for ideal safety and post-sunset swimming enjoyment. Of course, lighting also adds another aesthetic touch to the poolscape!ย 

Pool Coping and Surrounding Decking

  • A significant design element of your pool will be the materials used on the horizontal surface perimeter of the pool (aka pool coping) and the finishes for the areas around your pool (aka pool deck). This can range from all-concrete with monolithic coping and deck combos to natural stone or brick materials for the coping, and something else for the social areas on the exterior of the pool. Surrounding deck areas can be concrete, natural stone, travertine or porcelain pavers, even artificial turf, or a well-designed mixture of finishes. We design our decks to create social gathering spaces and walkways in order to eliminate wasted space around your pool.

Water and Fire Features

  • Moving water soothes the soul by stimulating both the visual and auditory senses.ย  Examples include a spa spillover, water bowls, sheer descents or scuppers on a wall, a boulder waterfall feature or grotto, rain curtains, and infinity (vanishing) edges.
  • Fire additions to the poolscape also stimulate the visual senses and add an exciting heating element. This includes gas and wood-burning fire pits, fire walls, fire bowls, and torches to name a few!ย 

Pool Exterior Extras

  • There are many things we can incorporate into the design to enhance the swimming pool experience and make it โ€œfun.โ€ These features include diving boards, slides, jump rocks, and walls.
  • Donโ€™t forget about pool furniture. We love to add furniture into our designs to help with project scale and to show you how we build spaces with purpose around your swimming pool.
  • As a part of our design renditions, we often design or incorporate outdoor kitchens, pergolas, pool houses, and even athletic fields and courts as part of project visualization.
  • Basic landscaping around the pool area is an important element to finish out the design and is always provided as part of our design. This includes basic coverage layout and plant fillers in bedded areas.ย 
    • Our premium design package takes it a step further to provide youwith a full landscaping design by our landscape architect. This includes a full-scale landscaping plan and rendition to include real plant species and counts, often featuring year-round color and ideal layering.

Walls and elevation management

  • Most yards in Georgia are not flat! Walls are a great (and often necessary) way to enhance your project while managing the elevation changes that already exist in your yard. There are three ways to incorporate functional walls into your swimming pool projects.
    • Raised walls – These are designed as a part of the pool to either offer a natural step down from a higher yard elevation or to retain an existing hill in the backdrop. They frequently incorporate water features and can also double as a jump wall!
    • Exposed walls – We utilize exposed walls to manage elevation transitions on the low side of the swimming pool. These spaces often double as seating areas around the pool or adjacent fire pit. We can integrate a swim-up bar or an outdoor kitchen area!ย 
    • External walls and integrated steps – These features outside the pool footprint can be designed into the project to create a separation of spaces and elevations. Sometimes these are freestanding, and other times they can be used for soil retention!

Our design team will bring all of the elements of the poolscape together into one masterpiece and visualize it in our 3D rendition software. We make it feel as real as it gets without actually building your pool. When the J&M team presents the design on our big screen TV (or in Virtual Reality if you prefer), we walk our clients through the story we have created togetherโ€“the story of why, how, where, and, finally, what pool fits their lifestyle!ย