Many people make the mistake of thinking that pool paving is a finishing touch in the creation of your pool. This is a massive fallacy that only the ignorant among us would try to propagate. Pool paving is so much than the trimming around the pool, this like saying that a woman’s hair merely surrounds her face and adds nothing to the completed picture, not only would a wife or girlfriend not agree but she would in fact be very upset.
The pool paving serves so many important functions, to see these one has to look back in time to before the pool was as common a sight as it is today. People used to swim in dams and rivers and watering holes, the common factor between all three being the fact that they are surrounded by grass. This becomes important when you consider what the said dam or river looks like after a few people have been enjoying the refreshing water.
In the absence of paving, people trek all the rubbish that they can collect between their toes and they deposit it in the pool. Pools were meant as a status symbol for the rich, but this was not really working if every time it was nice day the status symbol was reduced in appearance to that of a watering hole, filled with mud and floating debris and that is when some very clever people pondered how the same problem was solved in the home.
They decided to remedy the pool situation in exactly the same way. They put the porch or stoep around the pool. This is what pool paving really is. People grew tired of their guests bringing dirt into their homes and tramping into the carpets so they put down so less mobile material for the last few metres before the door, and it worked like a charm.
To take this principle to the pool was not hard at all and it made so much sense that since it began, the paving that has been used around the pool has always emulated that which is used for the stoep.