CONSTRUCTION

Who builds the villas?

The Apaulinha villas are built by Fábrica Policronica Lda, a general construction company holding its own Portuguese construction licence (alvará), with its own industrial production facility of approximately 6,500 m² in Rio Maior and its own construction equipment.

Fábrica Policronica is not an external contractor hired for the occasion — it is part of the project's integrated structure. Apaulinha is delivered through a vertical model in which design, direct project management, construction and production are all held in-house. The same team that conceived the villas builds them, using its own factory and machinery rather than layering subcontractors under a general contractor.

This methodology has been applied since 2007, across more than sixteen large projects ranging from 500 to 9,000 m². It is the working method of Julien Labrousse — architect and entrepreneur with over twenty-five years of full-cycle experience spanning design, structuring, construction and operation, whose built work includes two major Paris theatres (one a full reconstruction), six residential buildings in the Paris region of twenty to fifty apartments each, three hotels and luxury villa projects in Spain.

The Rio Maior facility matters practically as well as structurally. Owning a 6,500 m² production plant means elements can be fabricated under controlled conditions and quality can be verified before anything reaches the site — a level of oversight that a conventional developer, buying construction services on the market, cannot exercise.

Why it matters: in a market where most developments are priced and scheduled at the mercy of third-party contractors, a builder that is licensed, equipped, factory-backed and internal to the project removes the single largest source of risk in villa construction — the gap between whoever designs and whoever builds. For buyers, the entity answering for the design is the same one answering for the concrete.