Backyard negative edge pool with a white carrara marble wrap Monday, April 5, 2021, at the home of Myles Wise. (Les Hassell/News-Journal Photo)

Miles Wise loves the feeling of community where he built his house, on the golf course at The Challenge at Oak Forest.

If he sits on his back porch, it’s almost certain someone on the golf course will stop to say hello — or to marvel at his pool. Wise is a local Realtor and builder who decided he wanted to build his own custom home just after COVID-19 entered the world. He built his house right next door to his former house — proof of how much he loves the neighborhood — and moved into the home in July 2020.

“I did a custom negative edge pool,” with a white carrara marble wrap instead of a tile surround.

“It’s just a very high-end, extravagant pool on the golf course,” he said.

The bowl of the pool, where the water sits, is black gunite. If it’s hazy or stormy, the water in his pool looks black, he said.

It was an intentional decision to match the black and white theme of his house.

“I wanted that piece of the pool to incorporate my house,” he said.

Multi-colored iridescent tiles were used for edging the pool, which includes a tanning ledge.

“(The pool) has amazing lines as a whole…” Wise said, describing how the pool appears to “fall” into the golf course. “When you’re looking at my back porch, it looks like the pool never ends.”

His outdoor fire place includes a fountain, with seating all around it. He went to Stone Works in Longview for a custom set of 20-foot-long, 10-foot-high iron, foldback doors from the house, overlooking the pool. Wise also plans to add an outdoor kitchen in the future, as well as more landscaping.

The one-story, 3,000-square-foot house is full of custom touches.

“I just kind of went above and beyond,” he said.

It’s the community, though, the is truly the selling point for him: Multiple members of his family live in the neighborhood, and it’s a safe place to raise his son.

“For me personally, I don’t feel like I could ever leave this neighborhood,” he said.

Longtime trend, new twists

The emphasis on outdoor space is a trend that’s been around for about 20 years and that COVID-19 intensified, said Dick Tucker, owner of Tucker Landscape Design and Construction Services in Longview.

“The swimming pool guys are just swallowed. You can’t find anybody to get a pool dug in a year,” Tucker said. “I think people are trying to find things to spend their vacation money on around the house.”

They’re also doing new things with their yards, like what Tucker did for Steve and Susan Marrs in their backyard on Hidden Hills Circle in Longview.

Tucker designed and built a putting green into their backyard. The Marrs family bought the house in May 2020, and Steve said it had a “standard back porch.”

Their previous house had a nice garden area, and his wife wanted some flowers.

“The thing kind of grew and grew. It’s really nice. We love it,” said Steve Marrs, a retired baseball coach who now owns a business. His wife also is retired.

Their backyard had a lot of slope in it, which made it to where Tucker couldn’t get machinery into the backyard to do the necessary digging. His workers did it by hand, he said, with a retaining wall around the garden area that drops off and leaves an area for the Marrses’ dogs to run around.

Tucker said Steve Marrs wasn’t certain about the putting green at first, but Marrs said golf is one of his – and Tucker’s – hobbies.

“I thought that would be really nice, unique,” Steve Marrs said of what today is his seven-hole putting green.

“I use it a lot. My grandkids use it a lot,” he said. “They like coming over here and banging the golf ball around. I enjoy it too.

“The only negative on the putting green is my Lab likes to chase the golf ball while I’m putting.”

They had a pool at their previous home, but opted not to put one in at this house because pools are so much work, Steve Marrs said. They do have a jacuzzi that seats six and a fire pit in their yard, along with Susan Marrs’ flowers.

“We planted with a lot of perennials. She really loves plants and colors and stuff,” Tucker said.

‘Room to roam’

Heather and Darvy Mann’s home in Longview was years in the planning.

Her husband is now a pediatrician in Longview, but when they lived in Milwaukee, they started regularly attending the parade of homes. They continued when they moved here, so that’s some 10 years of planning exactly what they wanted in the home in which they now live. They’d take ideas from one house and then another.

“We knew what we wanted out of our outdoor space, just as we knew what we wanted with our indoor space when we walked in to make our plans,” Heather Mann said.

They ultimately selected Longview builder Perry Waggoner to construct their home – and an outdoor space they say they’re in love with.

Heather said they had been told it normally takes six to eight months to design a custom home, but they finished in about three months, or three meetings with the designer.

“We just knew what we wanted when we went into it,” she said. “We entertain a lot, and a lot of it is indoor-outdoor entertaining. We knew we needed a bigger space to do that.”

They spent two years hunting for the land to build on, she said, and selected a location with 16 acres.

“One of the things that’s really important to us, we want room to roam,” she said, and their land comes complete with creeks and trees that her two sons love to play in. (They were also expecting the birth of their third child, a girl, before the beginning of May.)

Because they knew they would be spending a lot of time with the children outdoors, they wanted big front and back porches and a larger pool than in their previous house.

“We knew we wanted something bigger to fit all our family and friends,” Heather said. “We just added more decking, made sure the porch was big enough.”

They opted for a double-sided fireplace in the back outdoor area, but no outdoor kitchen because where it would have been located would have blocked the traffic and view.

A single large pool has three sections – including a tanning ledge that’s about 9 or 10 inches deep, another area that is 3 to 4 feet deep, and then a 9-foot deep pool with a jumping ledge.

The family moved into the home in October.

“So far, everything – it’s great,” Heather said. “The kids have a playroom inside the house that is clean about 95 percent of the time because they’re playing outside.”

Entertainment focus

For Tyler builder Jayson Chandler and his wife, Bev, opportunities to entertain inside and outdoors were important to them as they designed their new home.

That means the house is the popular open-concept, with bonus areas built throughout the house for grandchildren and entertaining opportunities, a dining room big enough to seat 12 people, and a laundry room connected to the master bedroom and bathroom. It’s a popular detail these days, Chandler said.

There’s a separate coffee bar under the stairs, he said, which is one touch people are adding to their homes to try to keep the house clutter free.

The outdoor area was his focus.

“I wanted an area that was big enough to entertain in. Our patio is 33 feet long and 17 feet deep. It’s a pretty big area,” Chandler said. “We’ve got an outdoor kitchen. We’ve got a fireplace out there.”

They also have motorized screens that lower down to block out the heat in the summer, keep the bugs out or in the winter keep in the heat offered by a recessed patio heater.

“We’ve actually been able to use the covered patio area all the way up into December,” Chandler said. “It gets kind of hot out there. We were out there for New Year’s Eve. We got hot actually. We had to turn off the heater and open the screen. It allows you to use the space more months out of the year.”

The backyard is surrounded by an 8-foot-fence, built board-on-board to improve privacy. The fence was built on top of an approximately 4-foot retaining wall, made of stone that matches stone used to build the house. Together, the wall and fence provide a noise buffer for the house, Chandler said.

Careful thought went into the plantings in the backyard as well. Chandler worked with the landscaper to use as many evergreens as possible and to select plants that don’t drop leaves and petals that would get into the pool.

“We wanted to be able to use the area more months out of the year,” Chandler said, and that means still having the flower beds look attractive year round, not just spring and summer.

Trends were moving toward outdoor spaces before COVID, including in home remodels. COVID only reinforced the trend because outdoor spaces became more important, Chandler said.

“If you still want to have people over the risk of being inside and being in close proximity is there,” he said, but that can be mitigated in outdoor spaces.

Pizza ovens, ice makers, grills, sinks and wine or regular refrigerators have been among popular items in outdoor spaces, he said. Some people are tiling their back patios.

COVID has meant people aren’t taking vacations like they did, so outdoor spaces at home have become more important.

The Chandlers featured their Tyler home in the Tyler Area Builders Association 2020 Parade of Homes.

He recalled their previous home didn’t have a pool or outdoor space. He said several times during summer 2020, his family talked about how much more difficult the COVID shutdown would have been if they’d had to stay home without all the space and amenities they now have in their backyard outdoor area.

Make it the yard of the month

Just tear up the yard once.

That’s the advice Tyler landscaper Neal Anderson gave Tyler residents Rick and Lisa McCrary when they came to him about landscaping their backyard at the home they purchased on Lake Palestine about seven years ago.

They had bought it with the intention of remodeling the waterfront property, but the economy had initially delayed that. Then, they started in the backyard with a new boathouse.

“We started at the water and worked our way to the street. We got the boathouse finished,” said Rick McCrary. Lisa’s mom was always just big about wanting to come out and spend the weekends. She was hinting at me about, ‘When are you going to redo this yard?’”

She died before they could get started on the project.

The McCrarys had used Neal Anderson to landscape their home in Tyler at that time, and he called him again to talk to him about adding a nice walkway from the house to the boathouse, maybe a fire pit in the future.

Anderson met him at the house. McCrary said he gave him free reign and then went out of town.

When he came back, Anderson’s “got the walkway dug out … a 16-foot patio with a sunken fire pit,” McCrary said.

Flower beds were in place, too.

“Everything is just coming together, and I said, ‘I thought we were just doing the walkway?’” McCrary said, laughing. “Neal said you only want to tear it up once.”

McCrary then realized he’d forgotten something: He didn’t have a place to grill. He said Anderson solved that problem with a grilling area made out of Belgard pavers, a stone product, with a walkway.

“It’s very impressive to look at it,” McCrary said.

Then, the McCrarys doubled the footprint of the house itself. They called Anderson again, with Rick McCrary telling him he was “looking for the yard of the month club.”

“He took over from that and did an amazing job of putting in limestone, big limestone rocks, that created a natural walkway from the front yard to the back yard on both sides.”

Low maintenance shrubs that bloom at different times of the year are another feature McCrary said he likes.

“You’ve always got different colors going in and out, different aromas,” he said, and Anderson installed “full irrigation to all my pots, so when I’m not there during the weeks all my potted plants get watered, everything on the deck gets watered. It’s just an amazing job he did as far as the lake house.”

It’s actually the third house Anderson has landscaped for the McCrary’s. The first was the house they lived in in Tyler until in 2020. They set out to downsize and actually ended up purchasing a larger house which they have now hired him to landscape again, specifically getting the yard ready for the March wedding of one of their daughters.