Reinventing stone

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John Wilkinson - Accomplished leadership at Lake Michelle

Cape Town has had its first decent winter rain and the land is muddy.

“No,” I reply as he opens the car door, expecting that we’re going out onto the soggy part of the site.

“Good,” says John as an energetic young hound with a wide soft mouth bounds from the car to accompany his master to the site office for the interview.

John Wilkinson is the Project Manager at Lake Michelle, a vast lifestyle development in Noordhoek where thousands of square metres of Pavatile products are being used. Buster the dog was still a puppy when Lake Michelle’s landscape architect Tanya de Villiers happened to have him along on a meeting one day; and when John’s wife started talking of getting a Siamese cat, John left a picture on the dining room table, asking, “How about this instead?”

No-one in the history of dog ownership has ever resisted the face of a Shar Pei puppy.

When David Bridgman, an apple farmer from Elgin, approached Plan Trust four years ago to help sell an additional 224 units of land adjacent to The Lake, John came out of retirement (again!). Lake Michelle is a big project, but John has handled bigger: all in all he built around 3,500 houses during his time as founder of Condev and later with Pam Golding.

As we talk, Frans Pamplin of Pavatile is manoevring the all-terrain forklift through the damp ground with confident ease and precision, moving heavily laden pallets to areas normally only accessible by wheelbarrows and gumboots. John expresses his admiration for this Personalised Delivery Service — “the lorries, the shrink-wrap, the ease of handling, the huge difference [between this solution] and the old way of doing things”.

“And if there was a problem with quality,” says John, “then I would have known about it”.

At the boathouse we run into the sales agents. Almost all of the properties at Lake Michelle have been sold. When Jock Sparks of Sotheby’s hears that I am associated with Pavatile, he asks at once for contact details. He’s keen to tell other customers about the products he has seen. After they have left, a clearly impressed John remembers to phone him to draw his attention to the massive cast concrete culverts which Pavatile developed for the bridge and jetties.

The sun comes out and colours around Lake Michelle turn from pastels to intense greens and blues.

It was past midnight before I began writing this article, after a long working day with another busy one to follow. As I awoke this morning, what struck me about truly accomplished leaders like John Wilkinson is how in the face of daunting responsibilities within the constraints of time, money and performance, they can still make time for you, give you their full attention and do it all with such an air of calm.

More about the Lake Michelle project