Inland or No Land

Good land is getting very expensive now in Phuket. If you want to buy land near the beach or with a sea view the prices are skyrocketing. Nowadays many people are turning there attention to plots of land that are deeper in the island away from the beach. Farming families are selling off their land to people wanting to build a home or even to developers looking to snap up enough land to build a small community of 6 - 10 villas. I have recently been part of this process and have helped a friend with a nice plot of land inland from the coast. It's very nice land and is surrounded by agricultural areas including some lovely wetlands where local farmers grow water hyacinth. Here are some aerial photos of the property (marked in red shading) and the surroundings....

First consideration for building in these wetlands are the piling depths. After land survey and soil testing it was determined that our pilings must be a minimum of 18m. This will add some considerable expense to the initial structural costs but there is no way around this as the Thai authorities are very struct about this. I am helping my friend to sell the land by creating some conceptual villa designs their on the land area so investors can consider purchasing "off-plan". This is quite common in Phuket where as the buyer purchases the land and enters a contract with a construction company to build the villas as per the presented design. Here is my preliminary sketch of hpw I imagine the style to be.....

As usual once I had the sketches done I handed over to my render team and they set to work creating 3d renderings of the exteriors of the villas while my other girl started drawing up the master plans for the total development. Our idea was to share the cost of producing these renders with the landowner and when the sale happens we can look at how best to share the income. From my side my team are already on salary so did not cost me too much as they were able to tackle this work in between ongoing jobs. I wanted to make the roof some kind of contemporary twist of a traditional Thai or Japanese roof and use white clay tiles. Here is our first rendering of how we imagine the development to appear.

I want the approaches to the villas to be leafy and gentle. There should be plenty of greenery and high walls facing the street so that the owner experience is one of complete privacy. Garage doors are in my opinion always ugly on most developments here in Phuket. It drives me mad as many architects and developers see it as an unimportant afterthought that doesn't require much attention. This is very wrong. The garage door is the main facade of your villa property and it should be beautiful. I have designed these with teak cladding and some contemporary design.

To maximise airflow for the interiors I have created plenty of natural ventilation in the main living spaces including these pivoting teak partitions in the walkways that connect the master bedroom to the dining and living areas. I wanted it to feel kind of "Modern Asian". the ceilings will be double volume in the dining and living rooms with extraction systems in the ceilings to vent warm air.

We are close to finalising all the renderings and will soon compile everything together to pass to a property agent here on the island for presentation to potential investors or buyers. I'm not sure how long before it sells but one thing I do know is that the property market in Phuket is continuing to grow. More and more people are looking for property here and many wealth expats from Hong Kong are eyeing Phuket as a new place to live and do business. I hope soon we can start building on this land. I will keep you all posted! Have a great week ahead...:)