Upper Mission Pool & Landscape Integration: A Custom Pool Build

The Brief

Upper Mission is one of Kelowna’s newer hillside neighbourhoods, built out on graded lots with sweeping lake and valley views — and homeowners here are usually planning a backyard from a much blanker canvas than an older, established property. For a project like this, the ask is rarely “just a pool.” It’s a full outdoor living space: a pool that reads as part of the yard rather than a fenced-off feature, a patio big enough for entertaining, and planting that softens the hardscape and holds up to a hot, dry Okanagan summer.

The Approach

Sloped and terraced lots are the norm in Upper Mission, and pool placement has to work with that grade rather than fight it — retaining and terracing are often needed to create a level pad for the pool and surrounding patio while keeping sightlines to the view open. Many properties in this area also sit within subdivisions with architectural guidelines, so exterior finishes, fencing lines, and hardscape materials need to read as a considered part of the streetscape and backyard, not an add-on. We approach a build like this as one project from the start: pool, patio, planting beds, and lighting are all designed together on the same plan, so the transitions between poolside paving, lawn or turf, and garden beds feel deliberate rather than pieced together after the fact.

What We Built

The pool sits at the centre of a paver patio sized for lounging and entertaining, with clean paver coursing that carries the same material language around the pool edge, through the seating area, and into connecting walkways — the kind of continuous hardscape detail covered on our paver patios page. Planting beds are layered around the perimeter to break up the hard surfaces and give the space privacy and shade without blocking the view corridor, and low-voltage lighting is worked into the steps, bed edges, and patio to keep the space usable and safe after sunset. It’s this combination — the pool build itself plus the patio, planting, and lighting designed around it as a single project — that we think of as true pool-landscape integration; see our pool building page and our pool & landscape integration page for more on how we approach it.

Curious what a design-build pool project looks like for your own backyard? Learn more about our pool building and paver patio services, see what’s typical for properties in Upper Mission, Kelowna, or browse more of our work in the project gallery.