Business View Caribbean | November 2020

81 BUSINESS VIEW CARIBBEAN NOVEMBER 2020 to building luxury homes for private owners on request – later branching out into commercial work. And all was going swimmingly until early 2020 and the onset of COVID-19…As Knoepfel relates, “We’ve found that in this pandemic time, the business environment changed quite a bit. And so we’ve been doing a lot of smaller jobs. We typically don’t like to do those jobs because we have a lot of supervision and overhead; we usually don’t even get calls for jobs like that but with people in their homes more now and doing home projects, suddenly the island has all these needs for small projects for homeowners, and for commercial locations, as well. It seems people had time on their hands and thought it was a good time to get their little to-do list done.” JPK had several big jobs in progress pre-COVID and those have mostly stalled for the time being. Among them, the Frenchman’s Reef Marriott – the biggest project on the island at the time, with many hundreds of millions of dollars needed to repair it from storm damage after Hurricane Irma. “That reconstruction was in full swing with its reopening scheduled for 2020,” says Knoepfel, “but because of the pandemic they decided to shut the operation down and sent all the contractors home. We had a chunk of that job and a third, maybe even half, of our employees would have been working on it. They will eventually continue with us on what we’ve contracted to do but we’re just waiting for them to restart the project.” Another project JPK has worked on in the past, and is waiting to continue with, is at the Grand Hotel in downtown Charlotte Amalie. According to Knoepfel, “A Paris-based rum company, Hamilton & Lafayette, that makes their rum in Martinique is renting this large building and is going to open a rum museum for tourists. It’s a beautiful historic building right in the heart of town between the cruise ships and the shopping. The architects are from Paris and they have big plans. It’s quite a big project, so it could be exciting.” Like many places in the world, business on the island is starting to come back. Bars and JPK DEVELOPMENT