The Construction Source

FEBRUARY 2021 was toprovePlatinumSignature Homes’ limitless capability. Prior to that project, he had mostly done smaller projects but he wanted to show that he could do so much more. “As a new player in the market, I couldn’t find a client to give me a really big home, because I didn’t have the résumé,” he recalls. “So I decided to use my own capital. I built a big estate home and I opened it to the public for viewing – nobody had really done that before, and it actually worked out really, really well.” Another goal in designing the Araliya, he adds, was to make it “feel like a home,” and not a hotel lobby or an apartment building. “We wanted to create a warm feeling,” he explains. “We had high ceilings and big rooms, so that was a challenge, but we figured it out by asking ourselves ‘What would we want if we lived here? What are our needs? What will be our needs in five-to-10 years?’” “Because this was not a home that someone would live in for a while and then expand on in the future,” he adds. “Whoever lived there, it was probably going to be their home forever. So we had to think down the line. We had to ask ourselves the kind of questions we ask our clients.” Even before receiving those award nominations, Sunny – who designed the home in partnership with his architect – knew he had successfully answered those questions. By that point, the Araliya was already highly popular with the media and with the public. “There were a lot of news articles and a lot of TV coverage about that home,” Sunny says. “No builder in Edmonton had ever built a home of that scale and then let people come through it. The response was