Most Utah homeowners start with the pool. That makes sense — it is the biggest line item and the most exciting part of the project. But the families who end up happiest with their backyards five years later are almost always the ones who planned the space around the pool at the same time they planned the pool itself.

A pool is a destination. An outdoor living space is what makes people stay. Get the relationship between the two right and you gain an outdoor room your family uses from April through October. Get it wrong and you end up with a beautiful pool surrounded by a hot slab of concrete nobody wants to sit on in July.

Here is how we approach outdoor living design at Advantage Custom Pools, and the specific decisions that matter most in Utah’s climate.

Start With How You Actually Live Outside

Before anyone draws a shape on paper, we ask homeowners to describe a realistic summer Saturday. Not a magazine version — the real one. Who is home? Are you cooking outside or grilling and carrying plates back in? Do you have young kids who need to be visible from the kitchen window? Are you hosting twenty people twice a summer, or four people every week?

Those answers drive the layout more than any design trend. A family with three kids under ten needs open sightlines, a large shallow lounging area, and durable surfaces. A couple who entertains adults needs seating clusters, a bar surface, and lighting that looks good after dark. Both are great backyards. They are not the same backyard.

The four zones worth planning

• Water zone — the pool, spa, and the wet decking immediately around it.
• Cooking and dining zone — grill, prep counter, table. Should be close enough to the house that a forgotten dish is not a hike.
• Lounge zone — shade, soft seating, a fire feature. This is where people spend the most hours, and it is the zone most often forgotten.
• Circulation and buffer — the paths between zones, plus lawn or planting that keeps the hardscape from feeling like a parking lot.

If you can name where each of those four zones lives on your lot, you have a plan. If you cannot, you have a pool with furniture near it.

Utah-Specific Realities That Shape the Design

Designing outdoor living along the Wasatch Front is not the same as designing in Arizona or Southern California. Four things drive our decisions here.

1. Intense sun, but a short season

Utah gets high-altitude sun that will cook an unshaded deck. At the same time, our swim season is genuinely limited by shoulder-season nights. That combination means you want shade in the lounge zone and heat retention in the water — two goals that pull in opposite directions if you are not deliberate. Pavilions, pergolas, and shade sails handle the first. Pool insulation handles the second.

2. Freeze-thaw cycles

We routinely swing above and below freezing dozens of times each winter. Water gets into every joint, freezes, and expands. This is what quietly destroys Utah hardscape and, over time, poorly built pool shells. It is why we care so much about drainage details, joint spacing in decking, and — most of all — what the pool structure itself is made of.

3. Grade and difficult lots

Plenty of the best view lots in Draper, Alpine, Park City, and the east benches are on slopes. A sloped lot is not a problem, it is an opportunity for terracing: pool on one level, lounge and fire feature a few steps up, dining off the back door. It does mean retaining walls become part of the outdoor living design rather than an afterthought.

4. Wind and dust

Canyon winds will make an exposed pergola useless and blow debris across your water surface. Planting, privacy walls, and orienting the lounge zone with a solid element at its back all make a measurable difference in how often the space actually gets used.

Where the Pool Structure Changes Your Options

This is the part most outdoor living articles skip, and it is the part that has the biggest downstream effect on design freedom.

Our pools are built with the Advantage structural foam (EPS) system — engineered expanded-polystyrene forms that create the pool shell, reinforced and finished with a marble-clad interior. Compared with traditional gunite construction, that choice affects your backyard plan in several practical ways:

• Insulation. The shell itself insulates. Water that holds heat overnight means the shoulder seasons are usable, which means your outdoor living investment pays off across more weeks of the year — and your heating bill for those weeks is dramatically lower.
• Freeze-thaw durability. The waterproofing system we use is rated for 40+ years, and the pool carries a 2-year warranty. In a climate that cycles through freezing as often as ours, structural durability is not a luxury feature.
• Slopes and tight lots. Lighter forms and a build method that does not depend on a shotcrete rig getting perfect access make hillside and tight-access builds far more feasible. That opens up terraced designs on lots where a traditional builder would push you toward a smaller, less interesting layout.
• Shape precision. Because the forms are cut and set, crisp rectangles, sharp corners, and true-line geometry come out clean. That matters if your architecture is modern and you want the pool to read as an extension of the house rather than a blob in the lawn.
• Build timeline. A faster shell phase means less of your summer spent looking at a construction site — and better coordination when the same crew is also building your retaining walls and outdoor kitchen.

None of that means structural foam is the only way to get a good backyard. It means the structural decision and the lifestyle decision are connected, and it is worth making them together instead of six weeks apart.

The Elements Worth the Money

Not all outdoor living features earn their cost. After building a lot of these, here is our honest ranking.

Almost always worth it

• Real shade structure. A pavilion or substantial pergola is the single highest-use element in most Utah backyards. Umbrellas blow over; roofs do not.
• A fire feature. Extends your evenings by an hour and your season by weeks. A clean linear gas fire table or built-in fire pit gets used constantly.
• Lighting. Path lights, pool lights, and warm ambient lighting turn a daytime backyard into a nighttime one. Cheap relative to everything else and transformative.
• Generous decking depth on the sunny side. Lounge chairs need about 10 feet of usable depth to work with a walkway behind them. Skimping here is the most common regret we hear.

Worth it for the right family

• Full outdoor kitchen. Fantastic if you genuinely cook outside. If you grill twice a month, a good grill island and a nearby dining table gets you 80% of the benefit.
• Spa or hot tub tied into the pool. Very high value in Utah specifically, because it is a 12-month feature. Plan the plumbing and the raised wall with the pool, not later.
• Sport court or turf area. Great for families with school-age kids; dead space for everyone else.

Usually skip or scale back

• Oversized water features. Big dramatic waterfalls look great in renderings, cost real money, and often get turned off because of noise and evaporation. A simple sheer descent or bubblers deliver most of the effect.
• Too many small planting beds inside the hardscape. They collect debris, complicate maintenance, and fragment the space.
• Undersized “bonus” structures. A pergola too small to fit real furniture is decoration, not a room.

Sequencing: Do It Once, Do It Right

The most expensive way to build an outdoor living space is in three separate phases years apart. Every phase means re-mobilizing equipment, cutting into finished hardscape to run gas or electrical, and matching materials that have since been discontinued.

Even if you cannot fund everything at once, design everything at once and pre-run the infrastructure:

• Sleeve conduit and gas lines under decking for future kitchens, fire features, and heaters.
• Rough in electrical for future lighting and a spa.
• Set final grades and drainage for the full plan, not just phase one.
• Pour footings for a future pavilion while the equipment is already on site.

The incremental cost of stubbing out infrastructure during the pool build is small. The cost of adding it later is not.

Budget Framing

As a rough planning benchmark for Utah projects, homeowners building a complete backyard should expect the surrounding outdoor living elements to land somewhere between 40% and 100% of the pool budget, depending on how much hardscape, shade structure, and kitchen you want. A pool with a modest deck and a fire table sits at the low end. A pool with terraced retaining walls, a full pavilion, an outdoor kitchen, and extensive stone decking sits at the high end or above it.

That range is wide on purpose — the honest answer depends on your lot and your list. Our pool cost calculator is the fastest way to get a realistic starting number for the water portion, and from there we can scope the rest of the yard around it.

A Simple Planning Exercise

Before your first design meeting, do this. It takes twenty minutes and it makes the whole process better:

1. Take a photo of your backyard from your kitchen window and from the far back corner.
2. Mark where the sun hits at 2pm in July and where shade already exists.
3. Note the prevailing wind direction and any views worth framing — or screening.
4. Write down the four zones and where you think each should go.
5. List your top three must-haves and your one thing you would cut first.

Bring that to the table and you will get a far better plan than any homeowner who walks in with only a Pinterest board.

Ready to Plan Your Backyard?

We build custom pools, retaining walls, and complete outdoor living spaces throughout Utah from our shop in Lehi. Because we handle the structure, the hardscape, and the finish work, the plan you approve is the plan that gets built — with the grades, drainage, and infrastructure coordinated from day one.

Start with the cost calculator to get your baseline, then reach out and we will walk your yard with you.