Pool Terraces in Northeast Harbor, Maine.

A large share of our Maine 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.

A pool surround is the hardest-working stone on a Northeast Harbor property — wet feet, furniture, chlorine, and a New England freeze-thaw cycle all at once. Because the land here is pink Acadia granite under thin soil — the rock is the foundation, 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 granite mountainside dropping to a deep harbor beside Acadia, that is exactly where we spend the extra day.

Two properties on the same Northeast Harbor street can differ by a third in price, and it is almost never the stone. It is access for machines, the base depth pink Acadia granite under thin soil — the rock is the foundation calls for, how much water has to be managed, and whether existing planting has to be protected while we work.

You get an itemized scope after we walk the property — what is included, what is not, and where the money actually goes. No allowances that quietly become change orders halfway through.

The yards we buy from are regional and long-standing, which is how we can match an existing wall or terrace years later. In Northeast Harbor that continuity matters — the grand shingle-style “cottages” and Rockefeller-era estate grounds here tends to get added to over time, not replaced.

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 grand shingle-style “cottages” and Rockefeller-era estate grounds of Northeast Harbor 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 Northeast Harbor, Seal Harbor, and Asticou or anywhere else in town.