| Horizon Habitats
Horizon Habitats | Horizon Habitats is a building company that specialises in exceeding theirclient’s expectations and producing high quality homes. After being in business for over 25 years, they have built a name as one of Sydney’s most reputable builders. They are committed to providing a level of professionalism and reliability unsurpassed in the industry, producing results on time and within budget. They take pride in their work, and enjoy working together with clients to build their dream homes, offices, shops and restaurants. Their ultimate goal is simple – “to build something you’ll love, and love building.”
| Horizon Habitats www.jmcgroup.com.au THE BESTHOUSES FORTHE BEST CLIENTS
Horizon Habitats | “We’re passionate about building,” says DavidMoses, Managing Director. “It’s something we take pride in and enjoy doing. We love driving by our projects years later and looking what we’ve created, knowing that it holds up and that the client is very happy with it.” David joined Horizon Habitats in 1994 as a labourer and building cadet, working part time cleaning up building sites, mixing mortar for bricklayers and doing other miscellaneous tasks. After earning a Bachelor of Building Construction Management at UNSW, he spent a few years overseas, before moving back to Australia and rejoining Horizon as a Project Manager. In 2003, the company’s founder, Huw Davies, asked David to become a partner. Huw moved on in 2009, and since then, as the company’s Managing Director, David has led the business through years of organic growth. Today, Horizon Habitats’ core business is in the eastern suburbs and North Shore of THE RIGHT SYSTEMS
| Horizon Habitats Sydney. The company takes on projects valued up to $10 million or higher, while also having a division for small works and maintenance. The business is scalable and can manage up to 12 projects at a time without compromising on safety, quality or attention to detail. “We’ve got the right systems, the management staff and the right subcontractors to make it happen,” David says. According to David, Horizon Habitats provides “a truly collaborative approach” to building projects, with a focus on efficiency, communication and quality. He says they make a potentially difficult process not only easy, but “actually enjoyable – for clients, architects, designers and indeed the entire team.” “What sets us apart is how organised we are,” David says. “We recognise that builders don’t build, they manage. For us, that’s a core philosophy. We’re not electricians, plumbers, bricklayers, tilers or painters – all those guys build, and it’s up to us manage those guys to get the project built.” Horizon Habitats is a “modern day build-
Horizon Habitats | er” that has embraced the use of technology, which helps make that management more proficient. They have installed high-tech systems as part of their overall quality assurance structure to ensure they are as efficient and effective as possible. iPhones and iPads are used on all sites, so the project teams are working from the latest set of drawings and are immediately notified of updates. “Another one of our philosophies is that we don’t want to teach bricklayers to lay bricks,” David adds. “We want to find the best guys in each of their trades, and we want to let them do what they do best. We don’t want to teach them how to do their job. We want to be able to rely on their advice and be confident they’re going to do a great job every time.” “We’ve spent the last 25 years filtering out the wheat from the chaff, so all our guys are top quality operators who can deliver to our client’s expectations, or even exceed them,” David adds. In general, David says Horizon Habitats is also set apart by the high calibre of their team – which includes their direct team as well. He describes Horizon Habitats as a friendly “family” style company with over 60 full time employees. He says they provide a safe working environment for staff, as well as
| Horizon Habitats
Horizon Habitats | encourage further education and training, recognising that the company’s staff members are their “most valuable assets.” Horizon Habitats believes in that philosophy so much so that they pay for all their staff ’s education expenses – this makes for a better skilled workforce, and higher motivation amongst the team. Horizon Habitats also recognises the value in their partnerships with suppliers and subcontractors, David reiterates. He says those partnerships are “an integral part of the business,” and says some have been beneficial for more than 20 years. “We want to achieve longevity with everyone we work with,” David explains. “The way we do that is by being very efficient and organised, whichmeans we finish jobs quicker and with less stress.” “Building can be a very stressful process, but our clients enjoy it,” he adds. “We’ve gotten to the end of a job and have had clients tell us that they don’t know what they’re going to do every week at Tuesday at 2 o’clock, because they’re going to miss our building meeting. They love building with us, and
| Horizon Habitats INDUSTRY RECOGNISED they love their homes when they’re finished.” David says Horizon earns that high level of customer satisfaction by being organised, honest and by always acting with integrity. “I’m always telling all my guys to do the right thing,” he says. “It’s pretty simple – we say what we’re going to do and we do what we’re going to say. That’s a breath of fresh air for our clients.” At the 2014 MBA NSW Excellence Awards, David was personally awarded Young Builder of the Year, after being a finalist twice before. That award recognises his impressive career achievements, experience and industry knowledge. At the same event, Horizon Habitats also won an accolade in the category for Contract Houses $5 million to $10 million for a home they built in Manly. In their comments, judges described the winning home as “just amazing” and said it was “a well-deserved winner.” “It’s not something that drives us, but it’s nice to be recognised by our peers,” Da-
Horizon Habitats | vid says of the award recognition. “It’s a nice reward for the staff and the whole team, including the subcontractors, suppliers, owners and designers.” The award winning Manly home was 1,500 square metres in size and “built like a New Orleans chateau,” with five bedrooms, eight bathrooms, an eight car garage, study, wine cellar, outdoor kitchens, pool, gym and home theatre. Special features of the home imported included limestone cladding, plaster cornices, top quality joinery and copper rainwater products. According to David, difficulties included removing 3,500 cubic metres of rock for the basement. According to the judges, the internal finishes were “exceptional,” with extensive use made of marble, stone walling, amazing joinery and limestone cladding – the latter taking six stonemasons eight months to install. “It’s completely unique, there’s no other house like it in Australia,” David says of the project. “It’s different from anything we’ve done before, or anything anyone else has done before.” “It’s on a huge scale,” he adds. “It’s a really large house, especially considering it’s in the middle of Sydney.” David says it was a “very difficult build,” but they were able to overcome that difficulty through a process of intense collaboration between the clients, the architects and themselves. “It was a real team effort to achieve the quality that we did in the time frame we did,” he says. “It was all about good planning, good organisation and good team work. As the builder, it’s our role to make that all come together.” “It’s our job to make sure we have the right resources there to do the job in the best, most efficient and most cost effective way possible,” he adds. David also says it’s important to have the right number of resources. He is constantly reinforcing to his team that “one guy can dig a hole in four days, but four guys can do it in one – but 16 guys can’t dig a hole in two hours!” He says it’s all about having the right knowledge to ensure the most efficiency. David cites the project’s speedy rock removal as a prime example of Horizon Habitats living up to their prescribed role. “It was about not having one machine there, but having three machines there, and making sure we had 20 trucks every day to take the rock away,” he says. “That’s what we did all the way through. We also made sure we had the right plumber with the right
| Horizon Habitats amount of men and the right electrician with the right amount of men. We made sure they had the details they needed before they needed it so we were never waiting.” “Again, builders don’t build,” he says. “Our role is getting all of that information, organising it and directing it so that we’re controlling the process. We make sure all the pieces of the puzzle are in place to get the job done.” The Manly home was Horizon Habitats’ fifth award-winning home in five years, and just one of a long list of projects the company is exceptionally proud of. Another example of such a project is the Rosebay Residence – a palatial home that was completely refurbished a couple of years ago, which was located on the waterfront and difficult to access. According to David, some parts of the residence had to be accessed from the water by barge, and other parts required traversing a long driveway and a tall set of stairs. “The home was originally built by a developer who tried to save a lot of money, and the house was poorly built as a result and was leaking frommultiple points of entry,” David says. “We were engaged to first identify and A STUNNING TRANSFORMATION
Horizon Habitats | then fix all of the structural problems with the house and get it back to a state of integrity. From there, we were commissioned to refurbish it and fit it out with new bathrooms, new living areas, new doors and windows, and a new kitchen as well.” Due to the home’s original state of disrepair, Horizon Habitats could not quite give the client a fixed price at the start of the job. They had to proceed with a cost-plus contract. “Our forte as a company is delivering these kind of jobs, even when we don’t know how much it’s going to cost by the end,” he says. “We start with a reasonable budget, we update it every fortnight so the client is always aware of what their position is and the client is always in control over what gets done; by whom; and for how much.It’s not an open chequebook – every subcontractor is on a fixed price, once we develop a scope of work for them to undertake.” Ultimately, Horizon Habitats ended up doing a lot of work on the Rosebay project, but the client was consulted and collaborated with at every stage – so they were very satisfied with the process. “We pulled the house apart, we tunnelled behind walls that had been buried in the ground and we pulled up the driveway, re-waterproofed it and re-laid it, because it was the roof over some bedrooms,” David recalls.“We pulled out windows, re-waterproofed the whole house and then fully re-
| Horizon Habitats furbished it to a very high level of finish.” “Then we built a boat house down on the water, then a connection between the boat house and the house in the landscaping,” he continues. “It ended up being a magnificent house.” Horizon Habitats continues to maintain that house with their maintenance division, and the client has been so happy with the result that they have recommended Horizon to many other clients since. “That ended up being a gorgeous house,” agrees Meryl Hare, Principal of Hare + Klein, a multi-award winning interior design practice that Horizon worked with on the project. “We ended up making the house a lot more livable and cozy, and we took better advantage of the fantastic views,” she says. “It took a lot of work to get there. We had to do a lot of space planning and a lot refurbishing, but in the end it was quite a stunning transformation. The clients were absolutely delighted with the result.” Meryl has 33 years of experience in the design industry. She is a Fellow of the Design Institute of Australia (DIA), was inducted to their Hall of Fame in 2011 and is currently the National President of the SIDA Foundation. She has worked with David and Horizon Habitats for more than 15 years now and is currently working on two more projects them. She confirms they are among the most organised builders in the industry.
Horizon Habitats | “When people undertake building, they do so with a certain amount of trepidation,” Meryl says. “People often talk about the horror stories of cost overruns and time overruns, and one of the things about Horizon they ought to be very proud of is that they run a tight ship.” “They have good staff – I haven’t come across a bad site foreman on their side – and they run to time and they run to budget,” she adds. “They follow up their good building skills with good administration.” David has similar praise for the staff at Hare + Klein. “They’re a great team that we enjoy working with,” he says. “There’s mutual respect there. We rely on them for our design expertise and they rely on us for our project management and construction expertise. We complement each other.” “Sometimes we’re in a position to recommend a builder, and sometimes we’re not,” Meryl adds. “When we are in that position, Horizon would certainly be at the top of our list.” Hare + Klein was brought onto the Rose-
| Horizon Habitats A GOOD BUSINESS bay Residence at an early stage and recommended Horizon Habitats to get involved soon after. “And thank God we did, because it was a job that involved a lot of flexibility,” Meryl says. “The initial scope of works became much bigger as the job evolved, and it became apparent previous work that had been done was not up to scratch. It started off as a small job, but ended up being a large job, so it was good to have a company like Horizon as back-up. Because they had a support team and good systems in place, they were able to bring the job to a successful conclusion.” Currently, Horizon Habitats has a diverse range of projects underway; including multimillion dollar homes in Point Piper andWatson’s Bay home alterations in Redfern and Bondi, as well as new builds in East Killara, Manly, and even a super-high end luxury farm-stay outside of Picton, about an hour outside of Sydney’s CBD. They also have received recent inquiries from Melbourne and Byron Bay. Moving forward, David aims to continue “looking to the future and bringing it to the present” in terms of technology and building knowledge. They also aim to keep doing the right thing by their clients, and continue earning repeat work and referrals as a result. Historically, those sources have generated nearly all of the company’s business, and David hopes to keep it that way. “At the end of the day, we want to build the best houses in Sydney for the best architects and the best clients, while running a good business that’s going to be around for a long time,” he concludes.
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