South Tampa · 2025
Bayshore infinity
A narrow waterfront lot with a four-foot fall to the seawall. The slope that made the yard awkward is what made the vanishing edge possible.
The build
The lot ran long and narrow toward the seawall and dropped almost four feet on the way. Two other builders had quoted a rectangle on the flat part near the house, which would have put the pool in shade by three in the afternoon and left the drop as a retaining problem.
We used the fall instead. The pool sits at the far end where the light is, with a vanishing edge on the water side and a catch basin cut into the slope below. From the back door the surface reads as continuous with the bay.
The hard part was structural, not visual. An infinity edge on fill this close to a seawall needs a deeper footing and a beam engineered for the unbalanced load, plus a surge basin sized for the whole edge volume when the pump shuts off. That engineering is most of why this build ran fifteen weeks rather than eleven.
One detail
Why the edge is 3/8 inch thick at the lip
A vanishing edge only reads as a mirror if the water sheets evenly across the whole wall. The lip is ground flat to within an eighth of an inch across 15 feet, and the weir is set so the sheet stays attached rather than breaking into strands. That grinding is a day of work nobody sees.
Gallery