Rathdowne Ticks All The Boxes

Smiti and Karan have bought a large 16x32m waterfront lot at Rathdowne as their second home. They fell in love with Rathdowne as it ticked all their boxes for their family.

“It’s upmarket with the Residents’ Club and all its facilities, the gym and pools, the walking tracks and water conservation areas,” Smiti says. “It is much more pleasant and green compared to other estates in the area; and we could get a big block. “It is quite attractive. It has its own shopping centre, and all the things you need in a neighbourhood.”

Architect Smiti Singh has plied her design craft far and wide around the globe – the Indian Sub-Continent, the Middle East and Australia. She’s worked up new hospitals and five-star hotels, luxury villas, commercial projects, from Oman to Adelaide.

Together with husband Karan, also an architect, she’s negotiated her way through stark differences in building techniques, designs, materials, planning, you name it, along the way. She’s also managed to raise two teenage boys – Panav, 19, and Chinmay, 13 – and is presently helping her husband get a new Melbourne business off the ground.

Karan has a strong back-story too, including projects with some highly-placed ministers and bureaucrats in Oman’s King’s Palace. So when she says how pleased she is to buy into Villawood’s Rathdowne community at Wollert it carries a certain professional clout.

While they’re both architects, they’re looking to a volume builder to design their home, with a few personal tweaks, freeing them up to focus on their new enterprise.

Like true professionals they didn’t mess about. “Lots were going quickly so we acted quite fast. We came there on day and next day we booked.”