A homeowner’s story

How I built my dream pool in Emirates Hills with Green Creation

By John Harris · Villa owner, Emirates Hills · 9 July 2026

I moved to Dubai from Guildford in early 2024. We bought a villa in Emirates Hills, and the one thing my wife and I both agreed on was that the back garden needed a proper swimming pool. We wanted a proper swimming pool, not a little plunge pool. A real pool where you can swim lengths before work.

This is the whole story of how it got built, who built it, and everything I picked up on the way. If you’re looking at swimming pool contractors in Dubai right now and feeling a bit lost, I hope it saves you some of the guesswork I went through.

My pool at a glance

Why I wanted a pool in the first place

By June our garden was baking. The kids came home from school, and there was nowhere to cool off. Back in Surrey, we hardly ever used the garden. Here it’s the opposite. You live outside, but only if you’ve got shade and water. A pool in Dubai isn’t a luxury the way it is in England. It’s how you actually use your home for eight months of the year.

So in early 2025 I started reading up on swimming pool construction in Dubai. I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t know the difference between a skimmer pool and an overflow pool. I didn’t know you needed government approval for a hole in your garden. I learned fast.

How I found Green Creation

I did what everyone does. I typed “swimming pool construction companies in Dubai” into Google and started reading. A few names kept coming up. I looked at photos of finished pools, read the reviews, and made a shortlist of five.

Green Creation was the clear choice for a few simple reasons. Their Google rating sat at 4.9 with a long list of detailed reviews, not the two-line kind. Their project photos showed the sort of clean overflow pools I had in mind, the kind that look like glass, not the plain blue rectangles you see everywhere. And they’d been building pools in the UAE since 2004, so their work wasn’t someone’s side business. Twenty years, and from what their team told me, more than 8,000 pools finished. They’d also worked on projects for developers like Emaar, Meraas, Sobha and Hilton, which told me they were used to serious jobs, not small garden ponds.

I called them on a Tuesday. Someone picked up, listened, and booked a site visit for that Saturday. Two of the other companies never called me back at all.

The first visit and the design

A designer and an engineer arrived at the house together. That already felt different. The engineer looked at the ground, checked where the drainage ran, and asked about the water table. The designer walked through the garden with me and asked how we would actually use the pool.

This is where I learnt the big choice in swimming pool design in Dubai: skimmer or overflow. A skimmer pool has the water sitting a bit below the coping, with a little hatch on the side that pulls in surface water. An overflow pool sits right up to the brim, and the water spills over a thin slot edge into a hidden channel, then down to a balance tank and back up again. Overflow looks like glass. It’s more work, and it costs more, but once you’ve seen one, you can’t unsee it.

We went overflow, with one edge facing the golf course so the water looks like it drops away toward the view. They added a shallow sun ledge at one end, big enough for two loungers with your feet in the water. A week later they sent a 3D render. Seeing it before a single spade went in the ground made the whole thing feel real.

The build, week by week

Once the permit came through, the site turned into a proper building job. Here’s roughly how it went.

Digging and the concrete shell

They marked out the shape, then excavated. Next came the skeleton: a cage of steel rebar tied by hand across the floor and walls. Then the shell itself. Instead of pouring concrete into moulds, they sprayed it under high pressure as gunite, which packs it dense and strong against the steel. The shell is the part that has to last thirty years in Dubai heat, so I watched it closely. It then had to cure and be kept damp for days before anything else could happen.

Waterproofing, plumbing and the pump room

A waterproof membrane went over the whole shell. While that was going on, the plumbing was laid: the overflow slot and its channel, the balance tank, the main drain at the deepest point, and the return jets that push clean water back in. All of it runs to a small pump room they built at the side of the garden. Inside sits a variable-speed pump, a cartridge filter, the salt chlorinator and a heat pump so we can swim in January.

Tiling, coping and the deck

The inside was tiled in 20mm deep-blue glass mosaic. Up close, you can see how each little square catches the light. The coping, the flat cap around the top edge, was cut to sit flush for the overflow look, and the surrounding deck was laid in a non-slip stone that doesn’t cook your feet at 45 degrees. They set the underwater LED lights so the pool glows at night without a single visible wire.

Filling, balancing and handover

Then they filled it. The water chemistry gets balanced before you’re allowed in, so the pH and salt levels are right and the tiles stay clean. They walked me through the app that runs the pump, the heater and the lights from my phone. They handed over the drawings, the equipment warranties and a maintenance schedule. There was a short snagging list, mostly tiny things, and they came back and sorted every one.

The first swim was on a Thursday evening. The kids didn’t get out for two hours.

What happens after they leave

A pool isn’t a fit-and-forget thing, especially here. Leave one alone through a Dubai summer, and it turns green in about a week. So I signed up for their annual maintenance contract when the build finished.

A technician comes every week. He nets the surface, brushes the tiles, vacuums the floor, tests the water, tops up the chemicals, and checks the pump and filter. It’s a fixed monthly fee, which I prefer to calling around for one-off cleans. If you’re comparing pool cleaning companies in Dubai, this is the bit people forget to budget for, and it’s the difference between clear water and a swamp.

One more thing worth knowing: they don’t only build. My neighbour’s villa, with a cracked, tired old pool from the previous owner, cracked tiles and a leak somewhere in the plumbing. He used the same team as a pool repair contractor in Dubai. They found the leak, re-lined the shell and re-tiled it. It looks new now. So whether you need a fresh build, a swimming pool renovation in Dubai, or just a reliable pool maintenance company, it’s the same people either way.

Why I think they’re the best pool contractor in Dubai

I’m not an easy customer. I ask a lot of questions, and I chase things. Here’s what actually earned my trust.

One team stayed on my job from the first day to the last. Everything was handled by someone who had spoken to me. The engineer who checked my ground was the same person who signed off the shell. When I had a question at week four, I called the man who’d been there in week one.

They hit their dates. Seven weeks meant seven weeks, not “sometime after Ramadan”. In a city where builders are famous for drifting, that mattered more than I expected.

And the twenty years show up in small ways. They knew the water table on my street. They knew which tile grout survives Gulf UV and which fades. They knew exactly what Dubai Municipality wanted in the drawings, so nothing got kicked back. That’s not something a new company can fake.

A few things I’d tell a friend

• Get the pool contractor to handle the permits. Doing it yourself is a hassle, and building without approval can lead to a fine of up to AED 50,000.
• Be wary of the cheapest quote. The gap usually hides a thinner shell or cheaper tiles that show up two summers later.
• Sort out maintenance before the water goes in, not after it turns green.
• If you can stretch to an overflow edge, do it. It’s the single thing visitors always comment on.

Questions people keep asking me

John Harris

Villa owner · Emirates Hills, Dubai

John moved from Guildford to Dubai in 2024 and now lives in Emirates Hills with his wife and two children. He works in finance, swims most mornings before the school run, and wrote this after friends kept asking who built his pool.