Turn your backyard into an oasis with a pool. Design it to suit your needs, to give you ultimate enjoyment, will help ensure its success.
Open up a bridge to a pool island with dining or relaxation options – tables, lounge chairs, even a fire pit – as pictured here.
Hardscaping
The term ‘hardscaping’ covers every type of structure that is man-made on your property: your patio or ceramic paver walkways, your driveway, your fence, your retaining wall, and even your mail or paper delivery boxes. Landscaping is a big investment in time, money, sweat equity and texture, so there are ways to make everything last longer and add pop and pizzazz to it all. Hardscaping can include a fire pit as a focal point for outdoor entertaining, or a rock waterfall as a soothing energy center, or landscape lighting to beautifully delineate paths and landscape features.
Hardscapes allow you to develop your own outdoor living space, and can be crafted using a variety of materials from natural stone, pavers and concrete – you can even mix and match. Colour schemes and style choices that complement your general theme or design scheme.
While they might not be as enjoyable to look at as your poolside vegetation, hardscapes bring a number of utilitarian benefits to your pool project, such as erosion and slope stabilisation, and adding value to help your property stand out to potential purchasers.
Outdoor Living Spaces
Outdoor living spaces is one of the most important elements when it comes to designing a comfortable and hospitable backyard enviroment. Dining areas, lounge spaces and fire pits or buts; pools – they all help family to be together, unwind and recharge.
With swimming pools as the basis of the entire holiday home and creating an air of luxury and sophistication wherever they are located, not to mention the vast and all-encompassing nature of the fun activity that they facilitate, which is, moreover, excellent for the human bodymind, reducing stress and boosting wellbeing in the bargain.
Relaxing lounge chairs, hammocks and daybeds, along with pool accessories such as infinity-edge custom pool and spa; waterfall and firepit can create the ultimate backyard resort-at-home. Lighting options allow for enjoyment after the sun goes down.
Water Features
But the right water sounds can also create the perfect atmosphere for a five-star home spa experience, from calming waterfalls to beachy surf sounds. The right aquatic features in your pool can help you forget that you are in your very own backyard.
Whether you select a water element depends on your lifestyle and how you plan to use the pool. A bubbling rock fountain can make a striking focal point at a pool party or formal function; deck jets offer spray patterns that can be adjusted; rain curtains project dramatic wall watering-like effects.
A dramatic waterfall or grotto adds to the mood and drama of your pool design, while blending with its surrounding landscape. Likewise, a spa is a place to relax after swimming.
Lighting
Lighting is the key to shape a backyard home resort. It not only provides the safety benefits but sheds light on the landscape’s highlights, emphasises the water features and creates an inviting atmosphere in the backyard after sunset.
Lighten up the pool decking, textured walls, seating areas, outdoor kitchen and fire pit so your guests can traverse your space at dusk. Uplight large trees and plant features by employing uplighting techniques such as the CAST Craftsman Wash Light.
By creating areas of shadows, you can create intriguing patterns, as well as areas that ‘pop’ and draw the eye due to the contrast, such as trees in a combined hardscape/landscape environment, or even stonework and decking. By doing this, you can lend the impression of depth to your luxury backyard resort and differentiate it from the others in the neighbourhood.
Landscaping
Also important in creating an emotional retreat is the backyard landscaping itself, where the shade of trees and flowers enhance the atmospheric colouring, and the fountain or waterfall also enriches it aurally with sound-ambience, and the lighting continues that soothing sensation into the evening hours.
Combine luxury pool construction with a landscape design that takes a resort feel to the next level, and it’s possible that your yard will become the place you vacation every year – if at all – rather than some far-off destination. Let a team of architects, designers, contractors, and horticulturists bring your vision to life.
