Pool Terraces in Durham, New Hampshire.

Stone varies wildly pallet to pallet, so we select it ourselves. In Durham, where the local character runs to colonial antiques and well-kept university-town houses, getting the color and cleft right matters more than the grade printed on the invoice.

Durham drains into the Great Bay estuary, which is among the most closely protected water in New Hampshire — runoff and buffers are genuinely scrutinized here.

We coordinate with the pool builder, the electrician, and the landscape designer — often Jonathan Keep Landscape Design — so the terrace goes in at the right moment over the right backfill, and nothing gets opened back up later.

A large share of our New Hampshire work is executing drawings for landscape architects — reading elevations, holding the specified batter and joint, and flagging a conflict before it becomes a change order. Much of it in ongoing collaboration with Jonathan Keep Landscape Design.

Durham sits in Strafford County, and most weeks we are somewhere in this pocket of NH Seacoast — which means shorter travel, faster site visits, and a crew that already knows how ground behaves around here.

A pool surround is the hardest-working stone on a Durham property — wet feet, furniture, chlorine, and a New England freeze-thaw cycle all at once. Because the land here is marine clay and glacial till, wet where the land falls to the estuary, we excavate to depth and confine a compacted base under the whole terrace, then pitch it so water runs away from the pool shell and the house.

That base is why the coping stays true and the joints stay tight. Pool decks almost always fail at the edges, where backfill settles and nobody confined the base — on tidal Oyster River frontage and wooded uplands above Great Bay, that is exactly where we spend the extra day.