My ABG has a border of egg rock around it, that we sit plants and "decorations" on. Most of the plants come inside for the winter - they would not live in NJ winters (jade trees, bottle palms, aloes, etc.)
My deck goes a bit more than a 1/4 of the way around the pool. The shade structure on the deck is bolted to the deck and stays up all year, the fabric comes off for the winter though. The deck sits just under the top rail.
The filter is hard piped and the skimmer and return are under the deck. The filter itself sits just under the edge of the deck for easy access. It gets removed during the winter and lives in the shed.
The pool sort of sits in the middle of the yard like an island (where it is sunny most of the day)
Detail of deck, rock, and plants - yeah I prop the child gate open - my entire yard is fenced as well and has a auto closing child proof gate too (that we keep closed). We close the gate on the pool when we have small children over the house, our youngest is 10 and can open that gate anyway. You can just see the filter skimmer on the left hand side under the deck.
And that is where the filter lives
You can see how much of the pool has deck around it. the deck goes back to where the floats are all stacked up Pardon my dead grass - we have had almost no rain here.
