Cleator Landscape Design: The Studio Driving Modern Pool Design in La Jolla Backyards
Walk through almost any new build or major renovation across La Jolla’s coastal blocks right now and you’ll notice something unusual happening in the backyards. The kidney-shape pools that defined the neighborhood for forty years are disappearing. In their place: vanishing-edge water meeting the Pacific horizon, planted natural pools that read more like coastal tidepools than swimming pools, and clean-lined geometric pools designed in lockstep with the architecture above them. A meaningful share of that shift traces back to a single San Diego studio. Cleator Landscape Design, led by Jeff Cleator, has spent the last several years quietly building one of the most distinctive portfolios of residential modern pool design on the San Diego coast.
What sets the studio apart is less a single signature look and more a philosophy about where the pool sits in the design process. Jeff Cleator’s work tends to start with the lot itself—its grade, its prevailing wind, its sightline to the ocean or the canyon—and with the architecture of the home it serves. The pool gets designed alongside the house rather than dropped in afterward. That sequencing sounds obvious, but it’s the inverse of how most of the industry has historically operated, and it’s the reason Cleator’s pools tend to look inevitable on the properties they occupy.
A specialty in infinity pools above the Pacific
The bluffs and elevated lots running from La Jolla south through Bird Rock and across to Point Loma are some of the best infinity pool sites in the country, and Cleator Landscape Design has built a substantial part of its reputation working on them. The principle is simple: where the water surface meets the horizon and visually drops away, the pool and the ocean read as a single plane. The execution is where most projects either succeed or quietly fail.
A vanishing edge requires a perfectly level weir, a hidden catch basin sized to the pool’s surface area, and pumps engineered to balance evaporation, wind drift, and bather load all at once. A pool designed this way isn’t really a pool with a pretty edge attached—it’s an engineered hydraulic system that happens to be beautiful. Cleator’s portfolio in this category leans into that engineering reality rather than papering over it, which is part of why the studio has become a quiet referral favorite among architects working on coastal modernist homes.
Natural pools for clients who want the quieter approach
Not every client wants the cinematic infinity moment, and Cleator Landscape Design has a parallel body of work in natural pools—designs that look closer to a coastal pond or a tidepool than to a conventional swimming pool. These leans on stone coping, planted edges, and biological filtration rather than heavy chlorination. The water becomes part of the landscape instead of declaring itself against it.
Natural pools demand a different kind of design intelligence than infinity pools, and the studio approaches them as a horticultural problem as much as a hydraulic one. The water has to be deep enough to support the filtration ecosystem, the surrounding plant zones have to be sized correctly, and the materials—often local stone, sometimes salvaged—need to weather in ways that improve over time rather than degrade. Done well, the result is a pool that ages into a property rather than dating it. That matters in neighborhoods where homes change hands every few years and where buyers increasingly read a dated pool as a renovation cost rather than an amenity.
Why neighborhood fluency matters in San Diego
Anyone who has worked across the coastal San Diego market will tell you these neighborhoods don’t share a single brief. A Bird Rock lot stepping toward the ocean wants something different from a Pacific Beach lot tucked between two-story homes, which wants something different from a Point Loma property catching afternoon light off the harbor, which wants something different again from a classic La Jolla lot above the cove.
Cleator Landscape Design has worked across all four. The studio’s La Jolla projects tend to lean into the cove’s sightlines and the area’s slightly more formal architectural vocabulary. The Bird Rock work tends to play with elevation and the drama of the bluff edges. Pacific Beach projects often involve clever solutions for narrower lots and privacy considerations that don’t exist further north. Point Loma tends to call for designs that catch light and harbor views without competing with them. The through line isn’t a house style; it’s the discipline of designing for the specific lot rather than for a portfolio image.
How the studio engages a project
For homeowners planning a build or a major renovation in any of these neighborhoods, Cleator’s practical advice tends to be the same: bring the pool designer in early, ideally in the same conversation as the architect and the landscape designer. The studio’s strongest projects are almost always the ones where it was engaged at concept stage rather than after the home was already framed, because the relationship between the pool, the home’s primary view axis, and the landscape can’t really be solved retroactively.Homeowners and architects working on residential projects across La Jolla, Bird Rock, Pacific Beach, and Point Loma can see the studio’s portfolio at cleatordesigns.com. Whether the project calls for an infinity edge above the bluff or a natural pool tucked into a quieter lot, the consistent thread in Jeff Cleator’s work is a pool that looks like it could only have been this shape, in this place, on this property—which, on the San Diego coast, is harder to pull off than it sounds.
Media Credit: Cleatordesigns.com
