Remodeling from the Inside Out

Whether you are standing in the master suite, the screen porch or sitting in the dining area of the home’s great room, in very short order your gaze will be drawn to it: A long rectilinear pool extends outward from the protected cove of the newly remodeled home seemingly to the horizon — quite a feat for a pool that is only 13 feet wide and 55 feet long.

In the courtyard, the pool is very shallow and is anchored by potted plants. The shallows can be crossed by traversing a series of square concrete lily pads. But a few feet further out the colors change and so does the pool’s function. It shifts from a pseudo coi pond feel to a deck submerged in a couple inches of water. It is, in fact, called a Vegas deck. There, the homeowners can plop down a couple of lounge chairs and dangle their feet in the water. Beyond, enclosed within the pool rises an island that is a hot tub within the pool and a longer and deeper end that offers bathing and swimming.

Though the owners, Jim and Victoria Brown, did not know exactly what they wanted when they and their architect Jon Pankratz, AIA, retained D-CRAIN Design & Construction, Austin, to conceive a hardscape and landscape plan for the newly remodeled home, they certainly liked what they saw immediately when it was presented. They had seen D-CRAIN’s work in a shelter magazine and convinced the team to take the job, which was well outside their traditional service area.

“We liked it immediately,” says Brown, a transplanted Californian, who relocated his family to central Texas’ hill country. “Around here most of the pool contractors use plans that I would call ‘dated.’ They are kidney shaped. We really did not want to go in that direction.”

Pankratz, who reconceived a historic 19th century stone teacher’s cottage and built out arms around it to create a 5,000-sq.-ft. dwelling that is both modern and green, also greatly approved of the pool patio and grassy areas that tended to complete the home and complement it very well.

“I think the strength of the whole thing is that it can be a very intimate space, sort of hugging the main structures and it can be sort of open at the same time,” says Pankratz. “So there is this progression of spaces out from the house. And because it is long and narrow, it draws your line of sight out from the house into the open space — the pastureland and the trees. It is an architectural outdoor area.”

Attending to the details

Designed and built by D-CRAIN (formerly Big Red Sun), the pool also gained a great deal of visual interest from the home’s owner Victoria Brown. A clothes designer, she teamed up with Rahnee Gladwin, a tile showroom owner and designer, to select green and black glass tiles which gave the entire pool program a whole new level of vibrancy beyond the architectural virtues of the design.

“We knew we were going to do a glass pool, and then it was a matter of selecting colors that went with the environment,” says Gladwin, who owns R. Gladwin I. Design in Kerrville, Texas. “That is what drove this project. We wanted color. You can see how that green blends right into the grass and the trees beyond. It is a real acid green. It has a lot of yellow in it. The other tile color is black with some iridescence in it. We wanted the black to kind of sink to the bottom of the pool and give it a depth with some sparkle in it. This is particularly true on the Vegas deck that is not very deep. It gives it a deeper feeling.”