Five services. Planned and optimized from the start.

This is the service that prevents expensive misalignments between what an owner imagines and what a site can realistically deliver. It begins with the land. Before we assess viability or define a brief, we read the site. Topographic survey, solar path analysis, prevailing wind study, watershed mapping, permaculture assessment, and energy flow analysis. These inputs determine where the building sits, how it is oriented, where water moves, and what the land will support over twenty or fifty years. The lake, the volcanoes, the seasonal winds, and the rainfall patterns all have something to say. We listen before we draw.

From there we assess your design intent, define the development brief, and prepare a project delivery plan with realistic program phasing, budget frameworks, and a clear picture of what the project will require in terms of team, time, and capital.

Before any design work begins, we run a pro forma analysis on the project. What will it cost to build? What will it generate as a residence, short-term rental, retreat center, or mixed-use development? What is the realistic return over five and ten years? These questions should shape the design brief, not follow it. Pro forma first is one of the ways we protect owners from projects that are beautiful on paper and financially incoherent in practice.

Permitting is the step most contractors and owners skip, and the consequences are predictable. In Guatemala, building without a permit is illegal. Inspectors can stop construction, issue fines, and require demolition of unpermitted work. It also makes a property significantly harder to sell. Buyers with legal counsel or international investors behind them will not close without a clean permit history. Beyond the municipal permit, every project at Lake Atitlán should also carry a MARN environmental study. The lake sits within a protected watershed and scrutiny in the region has increased. We treat the environmental study as a standard part of every engagement, not an optional add-on.

Permit fees and environmental studies are one of the few direct ways construction participates in local municipal revenue and environmental stewardship. If you want better roads, better infrastructure, and a healthier lake around your property, this is one concrete place to start. We handle both the municipal permitting process and MARN coordination as part of every planning engagement, including OCRET requirements for lakefront properties. Getting this right at the beginning costs far less than correcting it later.

Preconstruction is not a single deliverable. It is a discipline that runs from the first napkin sketch to the day construction starts. We engage at whatever stage you arrive, early vision, active design, or a completed set of drawings that has never been pressure-tested against real costs.

At the earliest stage, we can take a general site, a rough program, and a quality level and give you a realistic order of magnitude budget before a single drawing exists. That number shapes everything that follows. Too many projects at Lake Atitlán begin with a design and discover the budget problem after the concrete is poured.

As design develops, we sit alongside the design team and build a conceptual budget in parallel. We compare it against the owner's budget continuously, not at bid time. We evaluate structural systems early because the foundation and frame are where the biggest savings live and where the biggest surprises hide. We identify long-lead materials at schematic phase, because a bamboo floor or a hardwood ceiling selected at design development carries a three to eighteen month procurement consequence if the supplier is not already preparing the material.

For clients who arrive with a design already complete, we run a full constructability review. Quantity estimate, value engineering audit, material sourcing mapped to local, domestic, and imported supply chains, coordination check between architectural, structural, and MEP systems, and a site logistics plan that accounts for how everything actually arrives at a Lake Atitlán jobsite. We also confirm the document set is ready for municipal permit and MARN environmental review, in the right language, with the right content.

The cost of preconstruction is always less than the cost of skipping it. The earlier you engage us, the more leverage the work has.

The boat ride, the steep path, the narrow road, the hand-carry up a hillside. These add up. Depending on site location, material delivery costs can run a 10 to 30 percent premium over the base project cost. On a significant build, that is a number worth taking seriously from day one.

Our project management team takes your construction schedule and maps every material's delivery chain from supplier to curbside before it is needed onsite. From there, our dedicated logistics crew takes physical ownership of the move, from the road to your jobsite, in a planned sequence that keeps your construction team focused on building, not waiting.

This is not a consulting service. We plan the delivery and we execute it. Materials are tracked, logged by receipt, and tied to a schedule of values updated as they arrive onsite. Routing material orders through Atitlán Build also removes a common source of cost inflation. Some contractors pad material line items to cover logistics risk, then add overhead on top of that. Our fee is visible and fixed. You know what things cost because we show you.

When delivery is managed this way from the start, contractors can bid your project assuming materials are already onsite. That improves both the quality and the competitiveness of each bid. The time and cost savings go back to you.

No blame passing between architect and contractor when something does not line up. No expensive gaps between what was drawn and what can actually be built. When the person designing the wall and the person building it are in the same conversation from the start, decisions about materials, sequence, and detailing happen when they can still change the outcome.

We structure our construction contracts as cost-plus with a fixed fee. Full open-book accounting throughout. A real schedule of values prepared before construction begins and updated every month. There is no padding hidden in line items. We earn trust by showing you the numbers, not by protecting them.

This delivery method covers both new construction and renovation. A significant portion of the buildable stock at Lake Atitlán was built without drawings, without waterproofing details, and without much design thinking. These buildings can be transformed. Natural plaster finishes, thermal mass retrofits, passive ventilation improvements, and biophilic interventions can take a building that was never designed and give it the character, comfort, and performance it was always missing. For hospitality operators acquiring existing properties, renovation is often the faster and more capital-efficient path to performance than starting from scratch. The same open-book, integrated delivery model applies whether we are building from the ground up or transforming what is already there.

This delivery method is still uncommon at Lake Atitlán. Most projects are built through a traditional design-bid-build sequence where the designer and the contractor have never met before the contract is signed. We think that is a strange way to build something you plan to live in or earn income from for decades.

We design hospitality properties with revenue performance as a primary brief. That means passive comfort, biophilic experience, and the guest-facing features that drive occupancy. Guest flow, privacy between units, outdoor experience, photography-worthy moments, durable finishes, and lighting that works in an Airbnb listing as well as it works at dusk on the terrace. These are design decisions, and they need to be made early, not retrofitted after the building is done.

For owners acquiring existing properties with short-term rental (STR) potential, we offer a pre-purchase performance assessment. It evaluates the realistic ceiling of the property and the gap between what it is and what it could become. Most buyers focus on the upside. We make sure the downside is understood too.

For new builds, hospitality optimization is built in from day one. The pro forma and the floor plan are written in the same room, by the same team, at the same time.