We’ve built pools across the high desert around Joshua Tree, California. Rocky ground, hard grades, and lots with no straight lines — the kind of site where a conventional pool means blasting or a retaining wall.
Here are two of them. Same 8′×20′ pool, two completely different approaches.
Desert Remedy — set into a hillside
A standard build with no upgrades: white fiberglass shell, set into a hillside with decking on three sides. The front was left open, so the container reads as exactly what it is.
This is what the base pool looks like when the site work is done well. Nothing you see here is an add-on.
Set into a hillside
The site slopes. Rather than level the whole pad, the pool was set into the grade and decking was built out from it on three sides, meeting the pool at coping height. Walk out of the house and the pool is flush with the deck — no steps down, no retaining wall in the sightline. This is one of the practical advantages of a pool that arrives finished. There’s no excavation to fight the slope with, and no forming or pouring on an uneven site. The pool is set once, and the deck is built to meet it.
The container stays visible
Three sides got wood cladding to tie into the deck and the house. The long front face was left bare on purpose. It’s a container pool, and the owner wanted it to look like one. That’s a choice, not a requirement. Some owners clad all four sides, some leave it entirely exposed, some paint it. The Corten steel exterior is finished with a marine-grade coating either way.
Standard equipment, no upgrades
This pool left our North Las Vegas facility with the standard build: white fiberglass shell, closed-cell ceramic insulation, Hayward pump and filtration, skimmer, heater, Pool Tiger sanitation with an in-line chlorine feeder, and Hayward ColorLogic 320 LED lighting. No window, no automatic cover, no swim machine. The colored lighting in the photo below isn’t an add-on. It’s on every pool we build.
Eight by twenty, in a yard with no straight lines
Boulders on three sides, desert scrub, and a grade running through the middle of the usable space. A conventional pool would have meant blasting or a long retaining wall. This one needed a level base and access for placement.
The rest of the property
The pool sits alongside a sport court and a pool house. The hot tub and barrel sauna came with the property — they’re not ours.
Box on the Rox — a pool built to match the house
A second Joshua Tree install, and a completely different idea. This one sits beside a container home, and the pool was finished in orange so it reads as part of the architecture instead of something parked next to it.
White fiberglass shell inside, custom orange exterior, and a large acrylic viewing window on the long face. Above ground, with a steel deck running alongside.
The window
The acrylic window is an upgrade and it adds four to five weeks to the build. On a pool sitting this exposed, it turns the container into something you look at rather than around.
After dark
ColorLogic LED lighting is standard on every pool we build. Through the window it lights the whole patio.
