When Jill and Paul McKeon bought a center-hall colonial in Ridgewood, their plan was to renovate the house but not the landscape, which had gone through a substantial redo only a year earlier. All they really wanted to do was add a pool, and the logical place for it—the only place for it, really, given the extensively terraced property—was at the very bottom of the steeply sloped backyard. But when their landscape designer, Thomas Flint of Thomas Flint Landscape Design & Development in Midland Park, offered them the option of siting the pool at the top of the property, it just felt right.
“We wanted to use the pool as much as possible,” says Jill McKeon. “And we knew we’d use it more if it was close to the house.” They also knew what they wanted in a landscape design: clean lines that would echo the contemporary style of the renovated house and complement the lushly wooded property.
Flint delivered, with an array of terraces topped by a rectilinear patio of white marble (with a sandblasted finish to make it safe to walk on when wet) and a rectangular pool and spa whose vanishing-edge design makes dramatic use of the property’s deep pitch. He used the same marble on a series of graphic stepping stones, interspersed with grass, he says, “to help soften the masonry and the pool,” and in the pool’s surround and interior tile line. He also chose white marble for the planters, which he filled with boxwood and other evergreen plants, leaving lots of space for perennials and annuals in vibrant shades of purple, fuchsia and hot pink to contrast with the marble and reflect vividly off the water’s surface. Flint finished the interior of the pool, eight feet at the deep end, with an exposed aggregate plaster in a subtle shade of gray-blue. For the spa, he chose a small white glass tile, a better fit for the contoured seating than the larger marble.
Thanks to its proximity to the house, the pool is in near constant use during the season, which the McKeons have managed to stretch considerably. The first year it was installed, they kept it open until Thanksgiving. “It was snowing when we closed it,” Jill McKeon remembers. This year, they opened it over Easter weekend, and the McKeons’ teenage son and daughter have barely missed a pool day since (soaking in the spa on days that were too
nippy for swimming).
The project wasn’t without its challenges, most notably, Flint says, ensuring that the pool be perfectly level, so the water would resemble a sheet of glass. To make the most of that highly reflective surface, Flint planted two flowering trees nearby and uplit them to create dramatic shadows on the water after dark. For a design driven by practical concerns, the effect is altogether magical.