Pool Service in Memorial, Houston

Two places share the Memorial name

Houston's Memorial is City super neighborhood 16: roughly I-10 on the north, Buffalo Bayou on the south, SH-6 to the west and the villages to the east. The Memorial Villages are something else: six small cities with their own governments and their own permit rules. Bunker Hill even runs its own water system.

Four of those villages, Bunker Hill, Hedwig, Hunters Creek and Piney Point, sit on Memorial's east side. The other two, Hilshire Village and Spring Valley Village, lie north of I-10 and are covered on our Spring Branch page. Below, we say which Memorial each point applies to.

Mid-century houses under a heavy canopy

Serious residential building started here in the 1950s and ranged from modest mass-produced houses to large estates. Nottingham Forest, Westchester and Fonn Villas followed in the 1960s, and Memorial Bend, just south of Memorial Drive, is often described as having Houston's highest concentration of mid-century modern homes. A pool on a lot that has been lived on since then may be on its second or third finish and set of equipment, or overdue for the next one.

The trees are the other constant. The City notes that buyers have long been drawn to Memorial's wooded terrain, and Terry Hershey Park runs about six miles along Buffalo Bayou on the southern edge, with dirt trails through dense bayou forest. Leaves and twigs pack skimmer baskets and load the filter between cleanings, so filter cleaning on a schedule keeps circulation from quietly falling off.

Three water systems, three starting points

Homes inside Houston's Memorial are generally on City of Houston water, mostly treated lake water with some deep groundwater. Hedwig, Hunters Creek and Piney Point are served by the Memorial Villages Water Authority, which pumps from wells in the Evangeline Aquifer and blends in water bought from Houston. The Riverbend section of Hunters Creek is the exception and gets City water. Bunker Hill Village runs its own system and aims for an even split of well water and Houston surface water.

Those blends do not behave identically in a pool, so calcium and alkalinity get measured at each stop instead of assumed from the house next door. One detail matters for MVWA customers: the authority gives no water or sewer credit for water used to fill a pool, so an unnecessary drain and refill is money spent for nothing.

Downstream of Addicks and Barker

Barker Reservoir lies west of Memorial and Addicks to the north, and both empty into Buffalo Bayou. During Harvey in 2017, the Army Corps of Engineers began controlled releases on August 28 and raised them to roughly 7,000 cubic feet per second from each dam by September 1. Areas downstream along the bayou flooded, the Kendall Library took four and a half to five feet of water, and the sunken stretch of the Beltway near CityCentre sat underwater for a week.

Eight years earlier, in April 2009, stream flow at the Buffalo Bayou gauge at Piney Point topped the March 1992 storm of record for the Memorial Villages area. A pool swamped by bayou water needs more than a skim: debris out, filter cleaned, equipment checked and the water brought back from green. Our green pool cleanup and storm cleanup pages explain how that works.

Village permits and the drive up from Sugar Land

Planning a remodel in Piney Point Village? Read the current pool renovation packet first. The 2021 version required Memorial Villages Water Authority approval before the city application, a tree disposition plan because trees generally may not come out for pool demolition, working door alarms and compliant gate latches. Other villages set their own rules.

Measured straight across, Memorial sits about 11 miles due north of our Sugar Land office. Beltway 8 north from the Southwest Freeway is the main line in, SH-6 serves the western end near Barker, and the villages can be reached from either the Beltway or Loop 610 West.

Memorial subdivisions and villages we serve