StartupRealities

Startup No 176 - StartupRealities 2020 series HighestPlatform installs raised observation decks and platforms at the top of houses and buildings or at the highest place in gardens where legally possible. This allows the building owners to climb up the stairs to the platform to look at the sky or film the sunset. CEO QUOTE "Most people dream of being up high - unless you have vertigo, of course. We make this happen: we install platforms on rooftops; we build a balcony above the balcony; we put up platforms in the canopy of trees. And it is an amazing experience to be standing at the top of the world, your world, looking at the sky. We can even lend you a temporary mobile platform, just to try for yourself the feeling of being up there. It is a real treat!" - said HighestPlatform founder and CEO Higgins Platt. Mobile platform (image source: Wikipedia )

StartupRealities No 104 PrefabDomes  is a building design company which has developed and patented a half-elliptic pre-fabricated domed roof of glass tiles and metal frames that is custom made for individual houses and can be installed in a day. The domed shape of the roof creates a fully-functional additional floor at the top of the building, so house owners will no longer need an attic conversion in the future. The dome is custom-produced at specialist manufacturing facilities off-site and is delivered in large segments that are assembled on-site. Windows and chimneys can be integrated into the design of the dome at the manufacturing stage. CEO QUOTE "PrefabDomes draws inspiration from the domes of mosques in Central Asian. We create so much additional space in a house and the fact that the rooms under the dome are fully functional spaces makes them the most expensive part of the house. If all houses installed a prefab dome, this would increase house-specific residential sp...

StartupRealities No 41 MoveOverRails is a real estate developer which builds multi-storey shopping malls and residential housing on top of train depots and railway lines. The company utilises the free space above railway infrastructure in busy densely-populated cities. Its buildings create a virtual tunnel for trains running underneath, separated from the occupied space by solid sound insulation. CEO QUOTE "If you haven't been to Hong Kong, you should go visit. Their metro network, the MTR, is amazing. It is primarily financed by revenue from the real estate developments above underground stations. These multi-storey shopping malls and residential towers make the best use of space in the closest proximity to public transport. The MTR was the inspiration for MoveOverRails. Our buildings, in a similar fashion, are always above railway lines and train depots. We build as high as planning regulations in the area allow, so we are making a significant contribution to expanding ...

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 obsta...