Custom Gunite Pools in Nichols Hills

Nichols Hills never had a street grid. The 1920s plan laid out wide lanes that follow the contours of the low hills and called for thousands of trees and shrubs to break the open prairie. Nearly a century on, those choices read as mature shade over established yards. Inside these 2.4 square miles, a lot usually arrives with its parts already in place: grown trees, planted beds, long sightlines, a house with an established facade.

So the design starts from what stays. Which trees shade the water in July. Which roots cannot be cut. Which lines of the house the pool should pick up, a window bay, a terrace edge, the run of a brick wall. Gunite suits this kind of site because the concrete is sprayed in place over a shaped steel frame, which lets the shell hold a crisp formal line beside the architecture or ease off axis to keep a tree.

Getting equipment in gets the same attention as the pool itself. Before any digging we walk the route with you: which fence section comes out, where the excavator enters, where soil is hauled away, and where the gunite rig and concrete trucks stand on the day the shell is sprayed. Lawn, beds, and irrigation lines along that corridor get marked so crews work inside a defined path instead of across the yard. That is how we plan the work at any address, and on streets this established it is most of the first conversation. The full build order is on our page covering what happens during construction.

One more local step is worth knowing early. The city also maintains its own Building Commission, which issues Certificates of Approval for building work in every zoning district: moving or demolishing a building, constructing a new dwelling, certain additions to a main building, and facade changes. A backyard pool is permitted through Building Inspections, and if your plans grow to include building work of that kind, the commission's review joins the sequence. We would rather map that at the design stage than find it at permit time.