Well it's been nearly a year since I posted here at Hive and firstly apologies for disappearing from the platform and the lovely community here. Much has happened in the last 12 months and I have been exceptionally busy as the world came out of covid and Thailand opened its doors to travellers. Phuket is busier than ever and the luxury villa real estate market is also, dare I say it, booming. This is good news for the island and many businesses are recovering and getting back to life. I have had many enquiries and have had to take on extra staff to keep up the demand. For today's story I would like to introduce you to the massive renovation we are doing for a lovely client that purchased an older style sea view villa on the northern beaches of Phuket.
Here is a pic of the villa as it is now (although you can see our team are already onsite)
The villa belongs to an older development and has a very old fashioned feel about it. Many of these older developments went down the same road of temple style roofs and the interiors are often heavy with dark teak and brash tiling. Often the spaces are poorly designed with little or no thought to maximising airflow and bringing the outside in.
The villa is built over three floors and the lower floor felt dark and was barely used. Our brief was to freshen up the interiors and to modernise the feel. This particular client is an architect so they understood well the limitations of working with an existing building. I loved the building so much though that we presented some CGI renderings to the client that were possibly a little beyond his orginal brief but i was confident when he saw them his vision would open beyond a little freshen up. Below are some of the renders my team and I put together.....
In the second render (the interior I am loving the patterned floor tiling. This is something I have started experimenting a lot with recently and I feel its kind of drawing from classic European style and really compliments well the modern tropical designs that most of my work needs to be.
We have completely re-designed the master bedroom and also added a second master bedroom suite. This was a request from the client. Here are a couple of the renders from the bedrooms and bathrooms...
These days my brother's construction company has grown to a 200 strong labour-force that are gaining a great reputation on the island. Our team have been hard at work for the last month or more at this project and here are few pics of my carpentry team preparing joinery...
The renovations are well underway though like all projects of this nature the early days are just hard ugly work. Stripping out all the existing decor, ripping up flooring and demolishing walls. This is the time I stay away from the site! Here we go......
I hope you find this newest villa renovation interesting and I will endeavour to write more about the projects I am working on now that business is back to normal and I have a little free time.