Skip Phillips | Questar Pools and Spas + Gene Brown | Valley Pool & Spa

Eye of the beholder

An important element of this design was the need to differentiate the spa area from the pool in the center of the yard. Phillips and Brown raised the lip of the spa about 2 inches above the nearly flush pool to give it what Phillips calls “visual weight.”

Without that lift, the spa would blend into the view. “If we had left the spa at the same elevation as the pool, it wouldn’t look right,” Phillips adds. “The spa needs to be higher than that to look proportionally accurate.”

The elevation of the spa also adds to the slightly futuristic feel of the yard. “It looks like a shiny cube slowly raising from the deck,” Brown says. “Everyone does a double-take [before they realize it’s a spa].”

That attention to detail goes below deck as well. Even though the spa appears to be separate from the pool, the half-inch slot surrounding the vessel actually flows directly into the pool’s surge tank, so the entire body of water is cared for in one system.