FlattenHills turns coastal hills into flattened plots for prime real estate
StartupRealities No 21
FlattenHills Limited is a construction and real estate company which buys coastal hills, mines the rocks in the hills for construction material, and converts the flattened plots into seaside residential developments.
INTERVIEW WITH THE FOUNDER
"Two people have inspired me to start my business and they lived more than 2,000 years apart," FlattenHills founder and CEO Phil Halls told us in an interview.
"The first one is Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing. His ports and properties empire makes perfect commercial sense. When the shipping and ports business is down, he converts port sites into prime seaside real estate. This business model cannot go wrong," Halls noted.
"My other inspiration is China's first emperor, Qin Shihuang. He said he would dig out the mountains and fill up the valleys. I am not sure why he said that but it makes sense if you are building a road, for example: you remove the obstacles and the rubble from the obstacles is used to fill up the depressions along the route. You can even see this logic in the Chinese language: the characters for convex (tu) and concave (ao) speak for themselves: 凸 and 凹."
"Why bother with quarries that you dig down like a hole in the ground if you can simply lob off the top of a hill and get all the construction material you need, plus a perfectly flat plot 10 metres above sea level overlooking the ocean?" - Halls added.
"In Hong Kong and other hilly coastal cities, they construct many of the ocean-facing buildings up the hills. That's one way of utilising coastal sites. But why not go the whole hog and flatten the hills? Dig-flatten-build is my hip-skip-jump," Halls concluded.
FlattenHills Limited is a construction and real estate company which buys coastal hills, mines the rocks in the hills for construction material, and converts the flattened plots into seaside residential developments.
INTERVIEW WITH THE FOUNDER
"Two people have inspired me to start my business and they lived more than 2,000 years apart," FlattenHills founder and CEO Phil Halls told us in an interview.
"The first one is Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing. His ports and properties empire makes perfect commercial sense. When the shipping and ports business is down, he converts port sites into prime seaside real estate. This business model cannot go wrong," Halls noted.
"My other inspiration is China's first emperor, Qin Shihuang. He said he would dig out the mountains and fill up the valleys. I am not sure why he said that but it makes sense if you are building a road, for example: you remove the obstacles and the rubble from the obstacles is used to fill up the depressions along the route. You can even see this logic in the Chinese language: the characters for convex (tu) and concave (ao) speak for themselves: 凸 and 凹."
"Why bother with quarries that you dig down like a hole in the ground if you can simply lob off the top of a hill and get all the construction material you need, plus a perfectly flat plot 10 metres above sea level overlooking the ocean?" - Halls added.
"In Hong Kong and other hilly coastal cities, they construct many of the ocean-facing buildings up the hills. That's one way of utilising coastal sites. But why not go the whole hog and flatten the hills? Dig-flatten-build is my hip-skip-jump," Halls concluded.
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| Middle Island, off Hong Kong Island (Source: Wikipedia) |
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