Of course the easiest and best way of landscaping your pool is to plan it when you are planning your house and garden. However, things don't always work out that way. All too often people buy a ready built house and pool, or they buy a house and add a pool on later.
The most difficult scenario to work with is when you buy a house with a pool and the pool has been built in totally the wrong place. Perhaps next to the garage, or way down at the bottom of the garden. This is not impossible to live with, but it may involve alterations within the house itself.
Ideally the pool should be as near as possible to your living/entertainment area. You can sometimes add windows and doors to give you views and access to your pool, or even add a summerhouse, a poolroom or patio off the pool deck.
Assuming your pool is built and it is more or less where you want it, your landscaping will have to work around what you already have.
Now what you need to consider are the following:
-What view of your pool do you have from your living or entertainment area? How can you improve that view? Ideally the water itself should be clearly seen and spread out in full view. If it isn't, perhaps paving and/or a lawn leading to it would give that wide open effect.
-If your pool is out of sight, you could try and create a curving pathway through shrubbery or decorative masonry that leads the eye. There is something enticing about a pathway leading to an unknown destination.
-Vistas. If you cannot have a wide sweep of water in your view, how about creating hints of open spaces that are seen through narrow archways or other openings in shrubbery or walls. If you can get a glimpse of water, so much the better. A statue, a bird bath, a water feature, a part of your pool or even a part of the sundeck would all work as a focal point in that vista.
-Now, from your pool, what is the view from there? Presumably you want privacy from the neighbours or from passers by, so you would most likely have walls, hedges or screens. Depending on your style, you might like a natural woodland type of surround, or perhaps more modern, stark geometric lines and angles. In this case, you would concentrate on textures and the impact of specimen plants and planters.
-The paved surround or wooden deck beside your pool is probably the most important part of your pool landscape. This is mostly a question of personal taste, but your climate and amount of sunlight may also play a part too.
-If you have intense sunlight burning down on your pool surround, you will have to decide whether a wood decking can handle it. You do get very effective polyurethane and other dressings for wood, but you may decide to rather go for one of the new wood/plastic composites that look just like wood but can take the harshest sun's rays. They don't rot or warp either.
