Elementum, Long Bay

Look up in a finished carpark and you should see one continuous surface.

You should not see where the soffit liner was cut around a duct, or where two sheets met at a services penetration, or where somebody ran out of patience near a sprinkler drop. Getting that result across the underside of every carpark slab in a nine-building residential development is the hardest thing we did in 2025.

Elementum at Long Bay on the North Shore was our largest single contract of the year at $711,000, delivered for Watts & Hughes on the Templeton Group development. The scope ran across the whole envelope: Pink Batts thermal to walls and ceilings, Autex Sound Solution to intertenancy walls and midfloors, and Autex soffit liner dressed around services to every carpark ceiling.

Carpark soffit is unforgiving because it is a finished surface in a space nobody thinks of as finished. Every penetration, every duct, every pipe has to be cut around cleanly. There is no ceiling grid to hide behind and no second trade following you. Doing that once is a craft problem. Doing it at nine buildings' worth of scale, on programme, is a resourcing problem, and the two pull against each other.

The other honest fact about this job is that the design changed a lot. Each change carried overhead: requantifying, re-ordering, resequencing crews, and reworking what had been planned. On a contract this size those costs are real and they do not appear in the original number. We absorbed more of that than we would now.

This is one of the few jobs on this site where our value was not simply price and clean installation. At $711,000 across nine buildings with a moving design, the work is coordination: holding a programme together across multiple crews and trades while the drawings underneath you keep moving. That is a different service to a $20,000 fitout and it should not be sold as the same thing.

We took a set of lessons out of Elementum that changed how we price design risk on large residential contracts. If you are running one, that experience is now part of what you get.