The Case for Slower Renovations

The renovation industry has quietly optimised itself around the handover photograph. Six weeks, one skip, a reveal. What that timeline can’t accommodate is the house telling you anything you didn’t already assume.

Year ten, not day one

A slower schedule lets you live with decisions before committing to them: a mocked-up doorway held in place for a week, a paint sample watched through a full cycle of morning and evening light. These pauses cost days. They save regrets that last decades.

We now build a deliberate holding week into every residential programme. No trades on site, just the clients and the half-finished rooms. The change orders that come out of that week are the cheapest ones we ever process.

Clients are often the ones who resist this most, understandably — a longer programme reads as a longer bill. We have found the opposite to be true: the projects that move slowest through the holding week are consistently the ones with the fewest costly change orders once construction actually starts.