Most people who buy a home in the Algarve are not here while it is being worked on.

They come for a week, they sign, and then they go back to work in another country while a building site happens without them. It is the thing they worry about most, and they are right to.

Two homes on this site were finished this way.

Chouquette is a studio in the 20th arrondissement of Paris. We ran that project between Paris and the Algarve: on site for the build, the rest handled from the studio.

Room for One More was finished while our clients were in England. We sent photographs as the rooms came apart and went back together.

Here is what we have learned about doing it properly.

Photographs are not a courtesy, they are the method

When a client cannot walk the site, the photograph is the site. It has to arrive often enough that nothing is a surprise, and it has to show the unfinished and the ugly as well as the good.

Decisions still have to be made at building speed

A wall does not wait. This is where a clear brief earns its keep: if we know what the house is meant to feel like and what the client will not accept, we can decide most things without a phone call, and save the calls for the ones that genuinely need them.

The distance changes the brief, not the standard

Everything gets specified more tightly, because there is no walking past a sample and saying "actually, no". That is not a compromise. It usually produces a more considered house.

Arriving is the moment that matters

Walking into a finished home is a different experience from walking into a project. That difference is worth protecting, and it is the last thing we do rather than the thing we run out of time for.