Polished Shellcrete lanai and pool deck
Sarasota, Florida
A covered lanai floor polished to a high gloss and laid in large panels that pick up the reflection of the sliding doors, running out to a screened pool deck with a raised ledge carrying a linear fire feature.
The challenge
A polished floor has nowhere to hide. Every low spot becomes a reflection that bends, and a bend in a reflection is visible from across a room in a way the same low spot under a matte finish simply is not.
What we did
Poured flat first, polished second. The lanai is laid in large panels and taken up through progressively finer grits until the floor returns the sliding doors behind it — mechanical polish, not a coating, so there is no film to peel or strip and re-coat in four years.
The gallery includes a detail most jobs never photograph: a square access lid cut and fitted flush into the slab. Services under a poured surface still have to be reachable, and the choice is between an obvious plate and a piece of the floor that lifts out. This is the second one.
Out from under cover, the screened deck carries a raised ledge with a linear fire feature set into it, and the coping slabs are shown being set on the bare pool shell alongside the blue glass mosaic.
The result
At dusk the lanai floor stops being a floor. The glass, the sky and the pool come back up off it and the covered area reads as considerably larger than its footprint — which is the whole argument for polished under a roof, and the whole reason it does not belong out in the open where it gets wet.
This job is on the pool decks page, in the polished finish.
Services used
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