Nothing is Forever Now, Not Even Our Home

Adriana Sierchuk is an architect that builds impressive houses. Her studio has won a lot of architecture, decoration and design international awards All of them have very unique design pieces. This makes Adriana the architect that the Argentinean upper class prefers. She is a specialist in building really; customized houses, designed to cater and reflect the owner’s unique personality, taste and needs.

Some months ago, the global crisis, added to a national one that was already taking place was an explosive cocktail to the local construction business (which until then was doing great): suddenly all the projects Adriana was working on were put on hold or cancelled.

Everything is reactivated now, but not everything is the same as before: she noticed a behavior change, her clients no longer ask for “customize to the extreme” “unique things for them” houses. They are still asking for interesting designs, but not that extreme. The reason behind the attitude shift is simple: they need “easy to re-sale” houses. These clients now are willing to compromise design that expresses their uniqueness, if that will give them flexibility to sell fast if they need-want to.
In Argentina’s chaotic economic environment those who have a lot of money are buying expensive things, but they need to have the freedom to transform those things back into money if “something happens”.

Challenge: Understand that in crisis times there are no long projects, and if we are asking them to make a big purchase, we need to offer them the flexibility to reverse it.

The Bubble

Dario is an Argentinean doctor who owns an (expensive) clinic in Buenos Aires, an other one in Punta Del Este and an office in Miami. He belongs to the very small percentage of wealthy people in Argentina, a country where 40% of the population lives in poverty and where the middle class is witnessing how their purchasing power shrinks every year. In Argentina violence, unemployment and poverty are on the raise while public education and health are deteriorating.

He lives in Nordelta, a very exclusive “private town”: a group of eight private neighborhoods with schools, malls and a medical center inside. ( I had to go through four controls until I reached his house.)

Nordelta was founded 10 years ago around a set of artifitial lakes.

Nordelta is almost a “parallel reality”: it is half an hour away from the center of Buenos Aires, but it feels like an other country. The houses are new, the streets are clean, the people are well dressed and the children drive their bikes in the streets.

Many of those who live there don’t need to go outside. And many wonder how will the children from Nordelta incorporate to society when they grow up (now it is too soon to tell).

Dario’s house has a private beach where he has a little sail boat. Nothing looks obnoxiously luxurious, nothing screams money.

But Dario is wealthy and he is enjoying it, with his money he is buying what almost everybody in Argentina lacks: safety, tranquility, an unpolluted view, health (his health insurance even covers treatments in the US) and academic excellence for his children.

For example, crime right now is a huge concern in Argentina, and almost every house has bars, but Dario doesn’t need to lock his house when he goes to sleep. He has three cars, but none of them is flashy (a medium size SUV, a PT Cruiser and a 2 seats topless Peugeot). He prefers it like that, “flashy is dangerous, I don’t want people to realize that I have money.”

Dario hasn’t always lived in an isolated community, he used to live in the city across Parque Lezama, one of the biggest parks the city. But one day he and his wife decided to go away. “I used to go to the park, some years ago people from different social classes could share the same space, now, it is full of drug addicts, it is dangerous and dirty. What happened with the park is a metaphor of what happened with our society,¨ he said in a nostalgic way. “I wish things were still like that, but I decided to give my children a safe present and protect them from the things that are going on…I know we live in a bubble here, but we are enjoying our lives..."

Opportunity: In a complicated environment give them access to the simple things: safety, sun, air ...an enjoyable present and the illusion of a brilliant future