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
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