Pool Terraces in Hollis, New Hampshire.

The coping is the one line everyone reads, from the water and from the house. We set it dead level to the shell with consistent overhang, and choose thermal bluestone or granite for grip underfoot — matched to the antique farmhouses and custom homes on farm acreage of Hollis so the pool reads as part of the garden, not a hole cut into it.

Seat walls, steps, and planting beds get designed into the surround from the start, whether the property sits in Hollis Center, Silver Lake, and Depot or anywhere else in town.

A pool surround is the hardest-working stone on a Hollis property — wet feet, furniture, chlorine, and a New England freeze-thaw cycle all at once. Because the land here is sandy loam over stony till, well drained on the orchard slopes, 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 apple orchards and wooded rural lots on gentle hills, that is exactly where we spend the extra day.

The yards we buy from are regional and long-standing, which is how we can match an existing wall or terrace years later. In Hollis that continuity matters — the antique farmhouses and custom homes on farm acreage here tends to get added to over time, not replaced.

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

Most Hollis homeowners are more worried about the disruption than the stone, and they are right to be. We stage material where it will not kill the lawn, protect the drive and the root zones, and sweep the site at the end of every working day.