When the City of Seabrook, Texas began looking at the future of its municipal pool complex — known locally as Pelican Bay — it was working with an aging facility that had grown costly to maintain and increasingly difficult to keep running. Today, that same site sits at the center of a full transformation: two rebuilt pools, a new pump room, renovated support buildings, all-new decking, fresh landscaping, and even a commissioned mural celebrating the facility’s identity. The facility opened to the public on August 22, 2026.
Leading the effort is Landmark Aquatic, which took on a role as both designer and general contractor working in direct partnership with the City of Seabrook. Structural engineering support came from CASE Engineering Inc., a longtime Landmark partner. We spoke with Keith Mohammed, Landmark’s senior project manager on the job, and with Seabrook City Manager Gayle Cook, about how the project came together.
From Feasibility Study to Bond Campaign
The project’s roots go back further than the October 2025 groundbreaking. According to Cook, the city first brought in Landmark Aquatic to conduct a feasibility study on the existing facility — a hybrid structure built in stages between 1974 and 1980 that had weathered multiple hurricanes over the decades.
That study, completed in early 2025 and presented to the City Council and governing board, delivered the news that simply bringing the existing pool up to current code would cost roughly $1 million, with most of that spending going toward underground infrastructure residents would never actually see above the deck. “It didn’t make sense to only renovate below the surface and above ground, we really wouldn’t have seen much of a change,” Cook said of that original $1 million estimate.
Faced with that math, Seabrook’s governing body decided to think bigger. Rather than spend a million dollars patching a facility that would look largely the same, the City Council pursued a bond campaign to fund a full upgrade of the pool complex — one that would bring everything up to code while giving the community pools and structures built for how residents would actually use the site today. Voters approved the bond, clearing the way for the project.
The Setting
The pool complex sits within Seabrook’s Miramar Park, directly across the street from the larger Meadow Park, with a walking trail, a playground with swing structures, and a covered skate park nearby. Mohammed described the site as a popular spot for morning joggers and mountain bikers even before the renovation’s completion. “We have three distinct and large neighborhoods surrounding the aquatic facility and park,” Cook said, describing Seabrook as a young, family-oriented community.
Designing Around the Community
Community input shaped many of the plan’s key decisions. Seabrook’s existing facility had actually included three bodies of water, but usage patterns varied widely. One pool — a small, ladder-entry-only design — saw the least activity of the three. At the same time, the city wanted to be mindful of long-standing groups that depended on the facility, particularly a local swim team that had historically used the site’s lap pool. “Our starting discussion included the needs of the local swim team that had historically used our pool,” Cook said. “The council set out to make sure the lap pool would remain and be improved.”
A community survey pointed to a second priority. Cook said the survey showed that a large share of the pool’s regular users were parents with young children — a group better served by a zero-entry design than the old ladder-entry pool.
Asked whether she thinks the finished design has met the City’s goals, Cook didn’t hesitate: “We do, yes.” She credited the Council’s early emphasis on the swim team and the survey data on family usage with steering the project toward its current mix — a rebuilt lap pool for competitive and lane swimming, and a new zero-entry activity pool built around families with small children.
Two Pools, One Community
That design intent is visible on-site today. The zero-entry activity pool replaced the underperforming, ladder-entry pool area. This includes a very unique “sun deck” incorporated into the pool where toddlers and parents can wade in shallow water while watching over younger swimmers in the connected zero-entry pool — a feature the city specifically requested. The activity pool also received a new aquatic play structure integrated into the zero-entry area, adding an interactive element that wasn’t part of the original facility. This pool is 3,871 square feet and 61,000 gallons of water in size.
The second pool is the rebuilt lap pool the swim team had asked the city to preserve — deep enough for diving at one end, complete with lane lines, wall targets, and in-pool steps. This pool is 3,418 square feet and 128,000 gallons of water in size.
Nearby, the facility’s existing splash pad wasn’t torn out, but it wasn’t left alone either. Landmark resurfaced and recoated the concrete, installed new spray nozzles, repainted the existing features, and replaced all the spray heads. The result, Mohammed said, is a splash pad that will look brand new without having been fully rebuilt.
Rebuilding the Pump Room — and the Power Behind It
Central to the renovation was a complete overhaul of the facility’s mechanical room. The room received new pumps and controllers, upgraded filtration equipment, and a new UV disinfection system as part of a broader push toward more efficient, modern pool equipment.
The electrical upgrade may be one of the less visible but more significant changes: the facility’s old single-phase electrical service was replaced entirely with new three-phase power, along with new panels, boxes, and service lines — a shift Mohammed said meaningfully increases operating efficiency.
New pool lighting was also added throughout the facility, and Cook said that upgrade was important as the facility was introducing a new senior swim program and needed to support both that program and the swim team’s evening practices. “We were starting to introduce senior swim, and so we needed upgraded lighting for both senior swim and the swim team that uses the pool in the evenings,” Cook said.
Because the equipment room sits in a coastal flood zone, it also had to meet Texas’s coastal “windstorm” building code requirements. To comply, Landmark designed breakaway wall panels engineered to release during storm surges, protecting the structure from pressure damage. The team also gave the equipment room a matching shade-structure roof and finish, so it reads as part of the same unified design as the rest of the pool deck rather than a purely utilitarian outbuilding. In fact, the design gives it a stylish, coastal-living appearance.
A Coastal Build: Windstorm Codes and Dewatering
Seabrook’s proximity to the Gulf Coast — Mohammed put the site at roughly two to three streets from the water — shaped much of the technical side of the project. Beyond the windstorm code requirements, the team had to contend with high groundwater and hydrostatic pressure during excavation. Landmark designed and built its own on-site dewatering system to keep groundwater from continually seeping into the newly excavated pool shells. Once concrete and shotcrete were poured, the permanent structure relieved much of that pressure — but until then, active dewatering was essential to keep the excavation workable.
New Decking, and a Careful Renovation of the Old Buildings
All of the pool deck concrete on the site is new, finished with a specialized textured coating system designed to stay cooler underfoot than standard concrete — an important detail for a facility that will see heavy summer sun.
The renovation of the facility’s existing support buildings, however, came with a constraint that had nothing to do with construction and everything to do with federal flood regulation. As a coastal community, Seabrook is subject to FEMA rules limiting how much an existing structure can be improved before it must legally be treated as new construction — and, in some cases, demolished rather than renovated. “There were challenges, mostly because we are a coastal community, very close to the ocean, and as a result FEMA has requirements including the fact that if you improve a property too much, you must demolish it. You can’t improve it beyond fifty percent,” Cook said.
That threshold shaped how Landmark approached the project’s older buildings, requiring a careful balance between new pool construction and just enough updating of the existing structures to avoid triggering a full teardown — while still giving the whole site a cohesive, upgraded feel. “It was a lot of work to match our vision of the city — to combine new construction with upgrading just enough to give the old buildings a new facelift as well,” Cook said.
On the construction side, the existing bathhouse and support structures — which Mohammed described as being in poor condition — were rebuilt with new metal roofing (in a blue tone) to visually tie them to the rest of the complex. Inside, crews installed new AC systems, completely replaced the plumbing, and added a new hot water heater.
An Iconic Entrance: The Pelican Bay Mural
One of the project’s most visible finishing touches wasn’t part of the original pool scope. Working together, Mohammed and Cook brought in local artist Adam Socie to paint a “Pelican Bay” mural at the facility’s entrance. Cook worked with Mohammed to find a local artist to give the facility a personal touch. “It’s amazing and really gives the facility an iconic, memorable entrance,” explains Cook. Scott Jones, COO of Landmark Aquatic also noted: “There are countless details, like this mural, that go into making a project successful, and it can be easy to overlook the smaller ones,” says Jones. “During my time on the Seabrook project, I was not only impressed by the talent of our pool builders, but also by their commitment to excellence.”