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The architecture was modern, the site was wooded on two sides, and the pool was oriented east-west — which meant about four hours of brutal afternoon sun hitting the loungers and the pool surface itself from the west. The owners had looked at a retractable pergola and a fixed aluminum louver system. Both felt too heavy, too architectural, wrong for the site.
They wanted something that would be visible as an object — sculptural, not hidden — and would block the worst of the sun without sealing off the sky. The sky over the greenbelt was part of why they bought the house. The shade couldn't take that away.
We mapped the sun path across the year, identified the three worst hours, and designed a three-panel sail array whose geometry specifically blocks that window. Two of the tension points were existing — the house wall and a mature live oak we anchored to through a root-protective arborist plate. The third was a single powder-coated steel post we drove through the pool deck into a concrete footing.
The sails gather visually from certain angles into one continuous form; from others, the individual triangles read. The sky is still there. The pool is still open. The loungers are usable through August.
