Anthony & Sylvan Pools, Houston, finished our new pool in spring of 2016 and we are completely thrilled with the pool AND the company. We have been swimming for about a year and a half now. We chose A&S pools after reading hundreds of reviews and interviewing 4 pool companies, and I was familiar with them for having built many pools in my home state and ones I grew up swimming in. We first interviewed A&S two years ago, and had Phil at the Houston location draw up a design for us. We also interviewed a small company that had built some neighbors pools. We weren't impressed with the smaller company's ideas and what they said during the interview. At the time we had too much going on and placed the idea on hold for a while. Then we called Phil from A&S again recently (which was 2 years later) and told him we were ready, and wanted to get his new pricing and had a few design changes for him. He still had our design on file, and he came out to discuss it further. We interviewed 2 additional other companies just to be fair and help make the decision, for a total of 4 companies in all. We showed them all a collection of photos that we had found on the internet of what we wanted. They all listened and came up with similar designs to each other but we noticed that they all had different design elements, materials, warranties and were including (or not including) different things. Some said we definitely needed something, and the other company said you definitely don't want that. There were pretty big differences. Once we realized this, we told them all that we needed to compare apples to apples and had them all build the same pool on paper with the same dimensions and same choice of materials. This resulted in them almost coming in about $1000 from each other. Finally the decision became obvious when we went with how comfortable with the company we were, keeping in mind the different guarantees, and the hundreds of reviews we looked at. Some companies had no reviews or just as many bad as good. We decided that we could NOT go wrong with Anthony Sylvan with how much BETTER their reviews were than everyone else, and again the fact that I was familiar with the company already. It seemed like the smartest and safest bet, also with someone that has been in business for over 70 years, and not changing their name because of bad practices like other companies. Boy were we right. I don't know how many times during the build we said "Wow am I glad we chose Anthony Sylvan and not one of the others." Our pool is about 26,000 gallons of pool and spa combined. They finished it in only 28 days from dig to water. 28 days! We did have good weather thru 90% of the project. This exceeded our expectations because we were told 6-8 weeks. We are used to contractors so we thought maybe 8-12 weeks. This was an end of winter/early spring build, so they were less busy than in the summer. Michele in scheduling provided us with a schedule online for each task to be completed that we could refer to. This was adjusted by Michele for rain and crew availability. It was nice to follow along. She was magnificent during the whole process. Their local pool showroom did not have a ton of choices of materials available, so we asked them what local tile companies supplied them, and we went to the massive show rooms of the tile companies and chose what we wanted, and then told A&S what the names were and it was not a problem at all. Glad we did! The workmanship on the pool is excellent. Lupe our project manager was great and everything is working as it should. There were small things along the way that needed attention, but we told A&S and they took care of all items quickly. We even made quite a few small changes to the pool along the way as we saw it being built and thought about things. A&S was great about accepting the changes and making it happen. As long as it isn't too late in each phase, you can do so, but of course be conscious of where they are in the process, and keep it to a minimum. We widened the pool by 4 feet and added decking square footage. Glad we did. At then end we had pool school with Brad that showed us how to operate it and take care of it. He knows what he is doing and was a very professional teacher. Also John helped us program our pool lights and did an excellent job as well. We didn't have ANY unexpected costs come up from A&S. That was a pretty huge deal to us and was a concern while interviewing the 4 companies. Some of the others we interviewed said that if the pool caved in after the dig and before gunnite due to heavy rain, that they would split the cost with us, or come to some kind of deal! Other people have been charged thousands by them for that. No way! A&S covers that, and even though it wasn't an issue for us, it was comforting to know that it would be covered. They were very trustworthy and their estimates were right on. No extra costs for plumbing nor electrical. The price of the contract was the price the pool cost. We are extremely happy we chose Anthony Sylvan to build our pool. Everyone involved was great, and we give them 5 stars as a company. As good as it gets! People that have come to see our pool say it's one of the best pools they have seen. Lots of compliments. It continues to be great in workmanship and operation. We are thrilled with our pool. They are a solid company with a ton of great reviews and happy customers, and we are added to that list. -Mark and Kelli, Houston