What we build
The specification index
What we do
Water, drawn properly
Architectural gunite
Pools drawn in section as well as plan — levels, edges and sightlines resolved against the house’s own geometry. The shell is engineered steel and shotcrete cured 28 days, but the point is the drawing: a Spandrel & Slate pool looks resolved from the second storey and the kitchen window equally.
Vanishing edges & weirs
A knife-edge weir is a hydraulic instrument before it is a photograph — catch basin sized to the surge, pumps staged, the water level held to the millimetre by a make-up valve that does not hunt. We draw them, price them honestly, and talk clients out of the ones their lot cannot support.
Spa rooms, not spa blobs
The spa as a piece of architecture: set into level changes, screened or open, heated by equipment sized to January, and plumbed so the jets are where the tall people and the short people have both agreed to sit. Covers that do not ruin the elevation, because we drew those too.
The specification book
Every commission closes as a bound book: sections, hydraulic schematic, finish schedule, the cure calendar, and the maintenance it will honestly need. Architects stamp it, insurers read it, and the next owner will thank you for it in writing.
The method
Design first, always
We quote from drawings, not from photographs — a fee covers the design phase, and construction prices only after the sections exist. It is slower and it is the entire reason the finished pool looks finished.
Materials & rates
The finish menu, priced
Design fees and the finishes our valley clients choose most. Construction is priced per book, but the materials carry posted ranges so the early conversations have numbers in them.
Spandrel & Slate — 2026 schedule
Design commission$4,800–$7,200
sections · hydraulic schematic · finish schedule · bound book
Glass-tile waterline$210–$340 / ft
installed per linear foot, mesh-backed, book-matched corners
Wet-edge pebble finishfrom $18,600
exposed aggregate, sealed, ten-year finish warranty
Knife-edge weirfrom $22,400
stainless weir wall, surge basin, staged pumps
Spa as architecturefrom $34,500
built-in, screened, January-heated, covers drawn in
Maintenance retainer$290 / month
monthly water school on site, quarterly hydraulic audit
The calendar
Book to first swim
Weeks 1–3
The commission
Measured survey, the design, the book. Two revisions are inside the fee; a third means we are designing a different pool, and we will say which one we prefer.
Weeks 4–5
Pricing the book
Construction priced line by line from the finished drawings — shell, hydraulics, finishes, the landscape it ties into. One number, fixed, with the contingency named rather than implied.
Weeks 6–14
The quiet site
A boarded, swept site with one machine at a time. Steel photographed, shotcrete cured 28 days, every buried stage documented into the book before the deck closes over it.
Week 15
Fill and water school
Balance logged, controls paired, and an hour at the edge teaching you the four numbers your water will ever ask you for. The retainer, if you take it, begins with that hour.
Selected commissions
Water as material
Six commissions from the valley floor book, photographed at handover with the architects’ permissions and their stamps in the folders.
Our architect asked to keep the specification book. That had not happened with the kitchen, the roof or the addition, and it is the review I keep giving: Spandrel & Slate draw water the way the rest of the project was drawn, and the pool looks like it was always in the section.
They told us the knife edge we wanted would look borrowed on our lot and drew a level-change spa instead. It cost less, it photographs better, and the water school alone was worth the fee — four numbers, one hour, no mystery left in the jar.
The retainer is an hour a month of a person who knows our pool’s hydraulic history by heart. Two years in, the water has never been off-spec, and the quarterly audit caught a seal before it became a bill.
Commissions accepted by referral; two remaining for the 2027 book · (555) 014-6180 · studio@spandrelandslate.example
The studio
Commission a design
Tell us about the house and the site, and send the architect’s drawings if they exist. The commission is a fee for a book — if the honest answer is a simpler pool than you came for, the book will say so on its first page. studio@spandrelandslate.example