Hardscapes
A beautiful swimming pool deserves equally beautiful surroundings. Complete outdoor living spaces designed to complement your pool: decks, patios, elevated seating, retaining walls, and walkways.
Hardscapes
The structure of your outdoor space.
Hardscapes are the permanent architectural features that define your outdoor environment. Unlike landscaping, which consists of plants and trees, hardscapes create the structure of your outdoor living area: pool decks and patios, walkways and steps, fire pit areas, seat walls, elevated entertaining spaces, and recessed conversation areas.
Your pool deck is one of the most important elements of your backyard. It creates the transition between your home and the water while providing comfortable spaces for relaxing, entertaining, and everyday living. A well-designed deck should be as beautiful as it is functional.
Every project is custom designed to complement your home's architecture while providing years of durability in your climate.
A travertine pool deck is paving cut from natural stone that formed where mineral-rich spring water laid down layer after layer over thousands of years. Colors run from soft ivory and cream through honey gold and warm brown to cool silver-gray. The surface is matte and lightly textured, scattered with the small pits and channels that are the stone’s signature. Barefoot it feels dry and grippy rather than slick, and in direct sun it stays noticeably cooler than poured concrete.
- Cool underfoot
- High · lightest tones coolest
- Finishes
- Tumbled, brushed, honed, chiseled
- Watch for
- Sub-base compaction
A marble pool deck is the brightest surface you can put around water. Marble is limestone that heat and pressure recrystallized underground, which packs the grain tight and gives the stone a clean, even face: no pits, no channels, very little visual noise. Colors run from near-white through cream and taupe to gray. Around a pool the effect is reflective: the deck throws light back up into the water, and the whole yard reads lighter and larger than the same space in a darker stone.
- Cool underfoot
- High · among the coolest stone
- Finishes
- Leathered, sandblasted, brushed
- Watch for
- White mortar, never gray
A shellstone pool deck puts fossilized shell right into the walking surface. Shellstone is a limestone formed from compacted marine shell, and unlike most limestone it’s cut so the shell stays visible: small fans, spirals, and fragments scattered across a sandy cream field. Up close it looks like a beach compressed into stone. From across the yard it reads as a soft, warm, slightly sandy surface, and the natural pocking gives it grip without any finishing process being needed to add texture.
- Cool underfoot
- High · same range as travertine
- Finishes
- Tumbled, brushed, sawn and textured
- Watch for
- Point loads and crate blending
A concrete paver pool deck is built from manufactured units: cast, pigmented, cured, and produced to consistent dimensions. Because they’re made rather than quarried, the range is enormous, with dozens of colors, shapes, textures, and edge profiles, in blends or single tones. They can be made to imitate stone or brick, or to look frankly like what they are. Every piece matches the next, which gives a paver deck a precision that natural stone can’t offer.
- Cool underfoot
- Medium · lighter tones narrow it
- Styles
- Stone-look, brick-look, tumbled, slab
- Watch for
- Pigment fade and edge restraint
Artificial turf around a pool is synthetic grass built in layers: polyethylene blades stitched into a perforated backing, laid over a compacted aggregate base, and weighted down with a granular infill brushed between the fibers. It stays green through every season, it never gets muddy at the edges where wet feet land, and it drops nothing into the water. Underfoot it’s soft and slightly springy, the only surface here that gives when you step on it.
- Cool underfoot
- Low · hotter than stone in sun
- Pile height
- Roughly 1 to 1.75 in poolside
- Watch for
- Base drainage and seams
Beyond the deck
Working in levels.
A retaining wall holds back earth so a sloped yard can become flat, usable space. Most residential walls are built from large segmental block: heavy manufactured units that stack with a built-in setback and lock together without mortar. Around a pool they do the work that makes the project possible at all, creating a level pad on a graded lot, holding a raised deck, terracing a hillside into usable ground, or forming the raised bed that a spa or a sheer descent sits on.
- Best for
- Sloped lots, terracing, seat walls
- Caps
- Flat, bullnose, or wide seating caps
- Watch for
- Drainage behind the wall
Elevated Seating Areas
Raised entertaining spaces that create visual interest while naturally defining different outdoor living spaces. They suit outdoor dining, fire pit gathering areas, outdoor kitchens, lounge seating, poolside entertaining, and viewing decks overlooking the pool.
- Often includes
- Decorative seat walls, integrated lighting, natural stone accents, custom steps
- What it does
- Gives a large yard dimension and separate destinations
Which surface fits?
Barefoot Summers
If the deck gets walked barefoot all summer, travertine or light marble. Light natural stone is the coolest surface here in full sun.
The Brightest Pool
If you want the pool to be the brightest thing in the yard, marble. It throws light back into the water and makes the whole space read larger.
A Standout Deck
If you want the deck itself to be interesting, shellstone. Fossilized shell in the walking surface is the detail guests notice.
Match Your Surroundings
If the deck has to match a driveway, a border, or an exact color, concrete pavers. Manufactured units are the only material that delivers exactly the sample.
Look Beyond Grass
If grass has already failed where wet feet land, artificial turf. Nothing gets tracked into the water and the mud line disappears.
FAQs
Care, base, and drainage apply to every material on this page, so they are answered here.
Do I need to seal my deck, and how often?
Yes on natural stone. Travertine, marble, and shellstone are all calcium carbonate, so acid is their enemy: vinegar, citrus, many household cleaners, even acidic rain and bird droppings leave a dull etched mark that cleaning will not undo. Clean with pH-neutral products only, and reseal roughly every year or two, sooner in constant sun or on a salt pool. The test is simple: when water stops beading and soaks straight in, it is time.
What makes a deck settle or spread?
Almost always the base. Site grading, base preparation, and compaction decide how a deck looks in year ten, and none of it is visible when the job is done. If the backfill around the pool is not compacted properly the deck settles within a year or two: hollow-sounding coping, cracked pieces, low spots that hold water. Spreading is the other half. A paved field is only as stable as its perimeter, and without proper edge restraint the outside courses migrate and joints open.
What does good installation look like beyond the material?
Drainage with somewhere to go, material layout planned rather than improvised, expansion allowed for, and joints stabilized. On natural stone it also means crates blended across the whole field during installation so no zone reads differently from the next, and joint sand topped up over the years rather than left to wash out.
Which pool deck material stays coolest underfoot?
Light natural stone. Ivory travertine and near-white marble are the most comfortable barefoot in full sun. Concrete pavers run warmer, particularly in mid and dark tones, and artificial turf is the one surface here that gets hotter than stone. In every material, tone matters more than the material name.
Can I mix materials on one deck?
Yes, and it usually improves the design. Bands of artificial turf between large-format pavers, a contrasting border in a different stone, or turf in the lounge area with stone at the water's edge are all common. What matters is that the transitions are planned rather than improvised.
Can a new deck go over my existing concrete?
Often yes. Thin remodel pavers are made for exactly that, along with coping profiles that cap the existing pool edge, and natural stone can be set over a sound slab. The slab underneath has to be structurally sound first.
Is natural stone slippery when wet?
It depends entirely on finish, not on the stone. Tumbled, brushed, sandblasted, bush-hammered, and flamed surfaces grip well wet. Honed and polished finishes are slick and do not belong near a splash zone. If a proposal names a stone without naming the finish, that gap is the risk.
What does a salt pool do to a stone deck?
Splash-out carries salt into the stone's pores, where crystals can slowly pit the surface over years. It affects porous stone more than dense stone. Rinsing the splash zone with fresh water after heavy use handles most of it, and sealing on a shorter cadence handles the rest.
Do you build the deck at the same time as the pool?
Yes, and that is the right way to do it. Grading, drainage, and the compaction of backfill around the pool are all deck decisions made during pool construction, which is why a deck added by someone else later is the most common source of settlement.
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