Boutique Palace

It has been raining cats and dogs since last night, and there's no sign of it letting up. Then again, weather here is a bit unpredictable as I've noticed that it will rain on a drop of a dime. Dad calls this the northeast rains (a Taiwanese phrase), which occurs this time of year. Oddly enough, it usually rains after intensely hot weather. In the past few days, the sky has been a bit gray and the weather is cool, and it has been raining on and off. Occassionally at night, I will hear the rain pounding hard on the roof, as loudly as if it were lead bullets coming down instead of droplets of water.

I've been pretty lazy lately and just taking it easy. Today is a working day though, I will be meeting with some architects on a project this afternoon. One of the amazing things about development in Taipei is that for residential projects, the developer will oftentimes build a "model home," which is a scaled model of one or two of the units plus a sales office, typically two to three stories tall with parking tucked under the building on the ground floor of the intended development site. I had visited one called Boutique Palace in central Taipei, and is so named because it is near Taipei's version of Rodeo Drive and is located near a string of high-end shops and international hotels. The sales office was really posh, with flat screen TVs and lounges, a huge crystal chandelier, and really shiny interior fixtures. We were greeted by no less than three people from the moment we set foot in the building. The exterior of the model home is usually very artsy and modern, and does not necessarily correspond with the style of the intended development. Boutique Palace's model home, however, went with more of a neoclassical style, while the actual permanent development will have a modern/international design.

After all the units have been sold, the developer will demolish the model home and then begin construction of the project. On average, they will spend about $600,000 to maybe up to a million dollars constructing and demolishing the model home. I think it is a bit of a waste to build and then demolish. In the US, developers will typically build a few units first, convert the garage of one of the units into a sales office or place a temporary sales trailer on the site, and then convert the unit back once all the units have been sold, so there is minimal demolition and they do not have to wait for all the units to be sold to begin construction. I suppose this model works when you have the luxury of having a lot of land, but it probably doesn't work so well for a mid- or high-rise residential development.

While Boutique Palace is a bit of a misnomer for a shiny glass building with studio lofts (hardly a palace) and maybe one or two "boutiques" on the ground floor, one thing I am thankful for is that these developers are not giving these projects cheesy Italian names and throwing in the word "villa."