Pool and landscape design in Downers Grove, IL, is decided by the coping, terrace, grade and planting around the water rather than the water itself. The pool is a defined shape on a plan. The twenty feet around it is the part people stand on, look at and live in, and it determines how the whole backyard works.
With over 25 years of experience, Green Grass Landscape is committed to delivering a Green Grass quality outdoor oasis, and on a pool project most of that work happens outside the water line.
We design and build the landscape the pool sits inside: the deck, the walls, the grade transitions, the screening and the lighting.
A pool deck has to resolve circulation, drainage and the transition from coping to the wider terrace. It sets how people move around the water and has to shed water away from the pool rather than into it.
Material choice follows from use: surface temperature underfoot in August, slip resistance when wet and how the joint pattern reads against the shape of the pool.
The deck also has to survive a western-suburbs winter. Freeze and thaw works on any surface set over a poorly drained base, and a deck that moves pulls away from the coping first.
Grade matters because few backyards around Downers Grove, Hinsdale or Oak Brook are flat, and a pool needs a level plane. On a sloping lot that means either cutting into the hill or building the grade up, and both answers produce retaining walls.
Those walls are a design opportunity rather than a necessary evil. Tiered ledgestone stepping down to the deck gives planting depth, creates seating height where you want it and turns the slope into the backdrop for the pool instead of a problem behind it.
Drainage belongs at the start of a pool landscape plan, and it decides more than people expect. A pool deck is a large impervious plane added to a yard that was already shedding water somewhere, and the heavy clay common across DuPage County does not absorb the difference quietly.
Collection points, a route for the water and an outlet that does not push the problem onto a neighbor all belong on the drawing. Getting this wrong produces a soft lawn edge and a settled deck corner within a few seasons.
A backyard pool needs enough screening to feel private without closing the yard in. Mature canopy and established neighboring houses are the norm on these lots, so screening usually means blocking two or three specific sightlines rather than ringing the property.
Plant selection around a pool has its own constraints. Heavy leaf and fruit drop near the water becomes a weekly chore, and anything with aggressive roots belongs well back from the deck and the equipment lines.
The landscape should be designed at the same time as the pool, before anyone digs. Deck elevation, wall heights, planting beds, lighting conduit and the equipment screen all interact, and deciding them on paper is what stops the pool trade and the landscape trade colliding on site.
Our pool and poolscape design work is scoped that way. Sequencing it properly is usually what separates a backyard that was designed from one that was assembled in the order the trades showed up.
A pool is the easy part of a pool project. The deck, the walls, the grade and the planting around it are where the design work lives, and our team reads the site and designs the whole backyard around the water for properties in Downers Grove, Hinsdale, Oak Brook and the surrounding western suburbs.
Contact Green Grass Landscape to start planning pool and landscape design for your backyard.
Can the landscape be designed after a pool is already in?
A landscape can be designed around an existing pool, and a good deal of Green Grass Landscape's work starts that way. The constraint is that deck elevation and equipment locations are already fixed, so the landscape design works around them rather than setting them. Designing both together gives more options, though an existing pool is a perfectly good starting point.
What should be built first on a DuPage County pool project?
Excavation and the pool shell come first on a DuPage County pool project, followed by grading and drainage, then walls and the deck, with planting and lighting last so heavy equipment does not damage finished material. The sequence sounds obvious, and it is the step most commonly gotten wrong when separate contractors schedule themselves.
How late in the year can landscape work around a pool be built?
Hardscape work around a pool continues into late fall in the western suburbs, with ground condition rather than the calendar setting the limit. Planting has a shorter window, so a late-season project often finishes the stonework in one year and the planting the following spring.
— Green Grass Landscape
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