Fifty Villas in a Row
Fifty triplex villas built in rows — most taken from foundation, some picked up at finishing and landscape stage. A repeated typology interrupted constantly by individual buyers wanting their one thing changed.
Running alongside the commercial work at SMR Holdings was a residential scheme: fifty triplex villas, laid out in rows. Where the mall was one complex structure, this was the same structure fifty times — which is a different discipline entirely.
I carried most of the villas from foundation upward, and picked up others already at finishing or landscape stage. The structure was standard and repeated, which should have made it simple. It did not, because individual customers arrived with one-off design change requests against a design meant to be identical fifty times over.
The work was absorbing those changes without letting them break the sequence — deciding what could be accommodated, what had to be refused, and how to keep a row moving when one unit in it had become bespoke.
Fifty villas delivered. The repetition taught me something a one-off build never would: where the waste actually lives. When you watch the same detail executed fifty times, the unnecessary cut, the over-ordered material and the avoidable rework stop being incidents and start being patterns — and patterns are the only thing you can actually design out.
The sustainability push I ran on the mall did not transfer here in any structural way. What I could do was educate the contractors, one conversation at a time.