Chlorine-free swimming and a living wetland, in one backyard. Browse real pond designs painted at every age, then design your own on a photo of your actual yard, and watch it grow in for twenty years before you dig.
Every one of these is a shape, a swim-to-plant ratio, and a lot it suits. Open any design in the studio to try it on your own yard.
A design only means something on the yard you actually own. Painted Acre starts from a photo of your lot, paints it as a watercolor, and drops the pond exactly where it would go, so you can see the real thing before an excavator ever shows up.
Drag the handle to see the same view before and after.
Paint my yard
Upload a photo of your yard, outline the pond, plant the banks, tag each piece with a year — then drag the timeline and print the plan.
Sketch the swim zone and regeneration shelf right on the painting of your yard — click around the edge, close the shape, adjust until it fits.
Drop iris, cattail, grasses and a shade tree — every pin tagged with the year it goes in: the deck in year 2, the path in year 3, a maple in year 5.
Drag the slider and watch the same design age from bare banks to year twenty, then print the plan for your contractor.
The pond is finished on day one; the landscape is not. Every frame below is the same sample plan rendered by the studio, built in phases: the pond in year one, the deck in year two, the path in year three, and twenty years of growth doing the rest.
Natural pools want sun for warmth, distance from big deciduous trees that would load the water with leaves, and ground an excavator can actually reach. Draw the footprint on a painting of your own lot first: an organic outline reads as natural, and a roughly even split between swim zone and planted regeneration zone is the classic starting ratio. Placing it on a real image of your yard settles arguments a graph-paper sketch never can.
The regeneration shelf carries marginal plants that scrub nutrients and keep the water clear. Around the banks you want grasses that arch over the waterline, a weeping tree for the classic reflection, and a birch or two for vertical structure. Growth is the whole story here: bank plantings look sparse the first two summers, then become the reason the pond looks like it was always there by year eight.
Built professionally, natural swimming ponds commonly run $50,000 and up; owner-built versions can cost a fraction of that. Either way, you phase it: dig and line in year one, hardscape the beach edge in year two, and let the plantings compound every year after. A year-by-year plan you can hand a contractor, with a shopping list, is exactly what the printable Painted Acre report gives you.
Every plant here is happy with wet feet, and the studio paints each one at every age it can grow. Enter your ZIP and the palette narrows to what survives your winters.
The regeneration-shelf showpiece: violet blooms rising from the shallow water.
The unmistakable pond silhouette; the living filter does the real work.
Pads and serene blooms for the still, open water of the swim zone.
A weathered dock at the deep end — the signal that says jump in.
Thrives with wet feet; peeling bark reflects beautifully off the water.
A bridge over the narrow waist makes the pond a destination, not a hazard.
Yes, that is what Painted Acre is for. Upload a photo of your backyard, draw the swim zone and the planted regeneration shelf directly on it, place the deck, the boulders and the beach entry, then drag the years forward to watch the planting fill in. You can try it on a sample yard first, and no account is needed.
Your photo becomes the canvas. Painted Acre paints your real lawn, fence line and tree line into watercolor, and the pond you draw sits on that ground at the scale you set. Every image on this page is real product output, not a stock photo.
Enter your ZIP and the palette filters to your USDA hardiness zone, so the cattail, iris and rush you place along the shelf are ones that overwinter where you live. Each species carries its own growth curve by age, which is why year 3 and year 12 are genuinely different pictures.
Yes, and most owners should. Every plant and structure carries the year it goes in, so the basin and swim zone can land in year one while the regeneration planting and the deck arrive later. The printable report breaks the shopping list out by year so you can see the spend spread across seasons.
An illustrative watercolor design plan: placement, plant choices, an honest view of growth over time, and a printable report with a to-scale plan view from above and a year-by-year shopping list. It is not an engineering or construction document. For excavation, water and grading, bring the plan to a qualified contractor and verify measurements, utilities and local codes first.
Start from a photo of your own yard, try any design above, and see it twenty years grown before you commit a shovel.
