Two luxury chalets in Lech, across the border in Austria. A spa zone with a sound healing room, a salt room, a sauna, a gym, and a full personal staff on site. The scope of the work was immense, and the window was just seven weeks. The client's only real flexibility was the name on the invoice.
— It has to be finished on December 6, when the ski season starts. Period. No matter what.
Ritter und Frank, Martin's company near Stuttgart, has been in the painting and plastering trade since 1868. Seventeen employees. A full order book already. The architect had called him directly because Ritter und Frank is known for one specific thing.
— We got this request because of the acoustics, really.
The work involved an overall concept where the ceilings and wall surfaces needed to be designed within a unified visual framework. Acoustic ceilings are a narrow craft. You trowel a soft material across a surface that has to absorb sound, yet still look like flawless architecture. The ceilings provide an excellent acoustic effect, while the wall surfaces are characterized by outstanding water vapor permeability — they breathe — alongside their high-end aesthetics. In a spa zone, the tolerance for a visible seam is zero. Ritter und Frank has spent years building that capability.
The specialty opened the door. The problem was capacity.
— The scale of the project was massive, and we were supposed to finish it in seven weeks. Even with all my own people, we would not have made it.
Lech am Arlberg, where the chalet stood, was Martin's own ski region — where he had come since he was a boy, where he still went every winter. He knew the town. He knew what a finished luxury chalet would require, and what was involved in getting it there. He also knew how to find the hands.
So Martin picked up the phone.
The person he called was Jochen Baur. An old friend, another craftsperson, twenty years in each other's phonebooks. Long before the ski chalet, they were the kind of friends who took each other's calls when a job got too big for one crew.
— So I asked around, and I got three of Jochen's people, sometimes four when we needed them.
Both crews would work on the same site. Painters and plasterers together. On the same scaffolding, finishing the same ceilings, alongside Martin's. Two companies. One crew. One deadline.
— We have been a group of friends for a long time, these companies. Beck, Übelacker, Ritter und Frank, Baur.
Nothing on this job ran smoothly from end to end. Martin says so himself — from day one to finish: stress, lying awake at night, moments where you wonder whether everything will hold together.
One such moment: the crew arrived on site, ten painters from Ritter und Frank, ready to begin.
They couldn't.
The surfaces were not ready for his painters. Ten people on the clock, nowhere to start. On a normal job, that is a delay. On a seven-week job to a ski-lift deadline, it is the beginning of a disaster.
Martin rearranged. Other trades on the chalet took their turn; his own painters shifted to whatever surfaces were ready; the project moved sideways until the walls caught up. That is how it went for seven weeks. A plan continually re-executed around whatever had just gone wrong.
Two things keep craft companies from sharing projects, even when the work is there for the taking.
The first is the owner's calculation.
— On my own, I would have had to turn this job down — and it was a project with a good margin in it.
The choice was not between a big profit and a smaller one. It was between a major premium order and no order at all.
Sharing the site did not dilute the success of the project. Premium jobs demand speed and scale. By pooling resources, they could deliver more work, in less time, than any 17-person company could book alone.
Put the question to him plainly — when two companies share a project like this: Is one plus one really still two, or something more like three?
— Yes, yes. Absolutely.
When the construction market is slow, and order books are getting thinner, the pressure is on to say yes to every call. Even the ones that seem too big or too fast.
In times like these, a strong network is your competitive edge. It allows you to take on premium, demanding jobs that you could never staff alone, while other companies have to turn them down.
In Lech, that network delivered. The ceiling went up, the spa opened on time, and on December 6, the first guests checked in to a flawless luxury chalet.
On the last two days of the job, Martin was on site himself. In the evenings, both crews sat together. The uncertainty from the first days was gone. What was left was a finished ceiling in a place he had known since he was a boy, delivered by a crew that had just proven it could be done.
Ask him how a 17-person family company from Germany delivered a massive luxury finish project in seven weeks, and he does not describe a strategy. He describes a reflex — call the right friend.
— For a project or a problem there is always a solution. Always.
There is already another request on his desk this year with the same shape: high spec, tight window, across a border. He expects to handle it the same way, with the same phone call. In a market where work is getting harder to come by, Martin is one of the craftspeople who can still take the work that arrives.
— In times like these, it is good to know we can still pull off work like this.