ABOUT
I have been restoring things for most of my adult life.
I am drawn to unrealized potential, especially when the problem is complex enough that the obvious solution does not work.
Over the years, the assets changed. Houses became businesses. Buildings became developments. Eventually, physical structures became teams, P&Ls and hotel operations.
The pattern remained remarkably consistent.
Today, I call that work Asset Architecture.
THE BEGINNING
It started with flipping.
In my twenties, I began buying and renovating houses. I loved taking something apart, understanding what was underneath, and rebuilding it better.
By the time I was 29, I had sold my third house. That one had been newly built, so there was very little to transform.
I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much.
It took me years to understand why.
I wasn’t particularly fascinated by property. I was fascinated by potential.
WHAT I AM ACTUALLY FOR
Smooth legs are a luxury. A tattoo you no longer want to carry is not.
Laser Inc. taught me that.
I got commercial. I invested in new lasers and added treatments. Hair removal was just starting then and the money was obvious. But the clients were different, and I felt different. In the end I hired someone else to do those treatments.
It took me a few years to understand why. Removing a tattoo is restoration, for the person in front of me and for me. Everything else was decoration.
If I am not adding value, I am not motivated. I cannot fake my way past it. For someone not especially spiritual, that is the closest thing to a revelation I have had.
The owner's side
Eleven years inside a family office.
For eleven years I ran the real estate for a private family office, in the Netherlands and in Costa Rica. I bought, held, let and sold on the family's behalf, I advised the principal, and I sat in the partner meetings of their private equity firm.
They used me for two things: seeing what an asset could become, and running the work that got it there. The design, the permits, the subsidies, the contractors, the hand-over.
Prinsengracht 733 was acquired in 2014, restored over three years, and 108% higher in value at the end of it. Veere was harder: the building had sunk and had never been supported on piles, so it had to be lifted and underpinned before anything could begin. Ecoral was a masterplan drawn from the land up.
The last of them was Almonds & Corals: a $2.5M capital transformation, a guest rating from 8.2 to 9.2, 100% retention in the fixed team, Blue Flag and CST certification, and a manager who runs it now without me.
Two countries, one principal, eleven years. I now do that work for other owners.
Projects are my frequency. Value creation is my currency.
HOW I WORK
People are the part that compounds.
What motivates me is people and potential, and most of all the two together: the potential sitting in someone who has never been given a reason to use it. In most operations there is someone hungry for an opportunity that nobody has offered them yet.
And then there are results. I will work through the night for a result, and I have.
Growth takes time and it takes room to get things wrong. When someone feels safe enough to take initiative and it fails, they learn something far more valuable than the mistake: they learn how to grow.
A few months in you can see it. People show up differently. They take responsibility without being asked to. One of them arrives on a new motorbike.
A team that feels safe to grow becomes a team that is loyal and accountable. That is the part that stays in the asset after I leave.
A leader doesn’t simply show the way. A leader helps people feel strong enough to walk it.
An operator’s hands, an investor’s eye, an architect’s read. The method is on Asset Architecture. The projects are in Selected Transformations.
TODAY
Where I am now.
I work from Costa Rica, across Latin America and the Caribbean, in Spanish, English and Dutch.
Alongside my own practice I co-founded CHN Hospitality Partners, a confidential brokerage for hospitality transactions in Central America, and I supply vetted investment opportunities to PROCOMER. I am vice president of Holland House, the Dutch-Costa Rican Chamber of Commerce.
WRITING
The Restoration.
I am writing a memoir. It asks the same question of the most private architecture: marriage, identity, trust, and the systems we inherit before we learn how to inspect them. Field Notes is where I think in public about the professional half of that work.
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