Pool areas
Everything that gets specified between the water and the fence.
A pool is roughly six material decisions stacked on top of each other, and they are usually made in this order. Get the shell and the edge right and the rest is finish; get them wrong and no finish rescues it.
Shotcrete / gunite shell
The decision everything else hangs off.
Concrete pneumatically applied over a tied steel cage in the excavated hole. Any shape, any depth, any edge — this is how essentially every custom pool in San Diego County gets built.
Cantilevered poured concrete
The edge your hand actually touches.
Concrete poured over a form so the deck itself turns down over the tile line. No joint between coping and deck, which is why it reads so clean — and why the deck and the edge have to be the same colour forever.
Glass mosaic waterline tile
What most decides the colour of the water.
Small glass squares on mesh sheets. Glass has depth that ceramic does not — it changes colour as the light moves — and it is the single most effective way to change what colour the water reads as.
Colour families — no photo heldStandard pebble aggregate
The interior — replaced, not repaired, so ask about its life.
Small natural pebbles broadcast into the plaster and washed back to expose them. Longest-lived family here and the one that makes water look like a lake instead of a bathtub. Also the most textured, which some feet mind.
Colour families — no photo heldTravertine paver
Deck surface, chosen for August feet as much as looks.
Quarried limestone with an open, pitted surface. The reason it turns up on so many San Diego pool decks is temperature: it stays noticeably cooler underfoot than dark concrete in full sun.
Colour families — no photo heldVariable-speed pump
The line item that sets your monthly bill.
The pump that moves the water, running at whatever speed the job needs instead of flat out. Because power draw falls away faster than flow does, running slower for longer is dramatically cheaper — which is why variable-speed is now the default on new residential pools in California.
Colour families — no photo heldAutomatic track cover
Decide at design or you cannot have one.
A motorised sheet running in tracks along both long edges, opening and closing with a key. The only cover people genuinely use every day, because using it costs nothing — and the one that most constrains the shape of the pool.
Colour families — no photo held