Why Pakistan builds boring buildings and how Danyal Shiekh wants to fix it

Two Danyal Shiekhs and one Murree Expressway project

The episode opens with Muzamil flagging a small piece of trivia: there are two Danyal Shiekhs he knows, one a content creator and the other his guest. The guest, he clarifies, is the one running Beverly Hills Residence — an eight-storey, fifty-thousand-square-foot apartment project on the Murree Expressway near Gloria Jean’s — and a parallel startup called lamhay.com.

Danyal introduces lamhay.com almost as a side note before the real conversation begins. The platform, he says, exists so “anyone can send gifts to anyone” from inside or outside Pakistan, and the longer vision is to empower Pakistani artists. “My vision is taking the art of Pakistan from Pakistan to the world.” That sentence sets the temperature of the whole episode. Danyal is not selling apartments or paintings. He is trying to build things that travel.

From Faisalabad to Washington DC, and a reverse culture shock

Muzamil asks about the route in. Danyal is from Faisalabad, went to Beacon Hills there, then Roots DHA, then American University in Washington DC. He is candid that the DC decision was not driven by program quality. “I was always a guy who used to love comfort zone,” he says, and his father pushed him out of it. “You have not seen anything. You have not seen the world.”

What he found in DC was the opposite of the culture shock most Pakistani students describe. “Faisalabad mein already log funny hotay hain and I was a very funny guy of my group.” In DC, nobody understood his lingo. “I was like, I made a wrong decision. I think I should have stayed in Lahore, Faisalabad.” Then a familiar realisation: humour is portable. Once his sense of humour translated, he made friends, started “shining like I used to in Pakistan,” and the experience reset.

The family business he walked away from is textiles — knitting and manufacturing for American Eagle, Gap and Zara, with a US office his grandfather started and his father and uncles still run. His brother is doing a PhD in Australia; his sister just finished a masters at UC Berkeley. Muzamil notes the spread dryly: “PhD and masters from Berkeley and then construction. We have the perfect combination.”

Why not just inherit the textile business

Muzamil presses on the obvious question. The default play for a son of a successful Faisalabad textile family is to walk into a directorship and an easy life. Danyal does not pretend the easy version was unavailable. He just did not want it.

“I always had the entrepreneurial drive to start something from scratch,” he says. “I have a bigger sense of achievement that something that never existed is existing slowly. It’s like my baby.” He is careful to credit his team and his advisors — “real estate is not an easy business” — but the line he keeps returning to is ownership of the decision. “You are the decision maker. You are pursuing what you really truly wanted.”

The Marriott chapter sits inside this. Danyal worked at Marriott International headquarters as a digital marketing analyst, with a portfolio of around a hundred and fifty hotels across the Caribbean and Latin America. The discounted travel — Ritz-Carlton once a month “for not even a fraction of the price” — left a specific impression. A small spa room he visited stayed with him so vividly that the spa inside Beverly Hills Residence is a direct reference.

Experiential living, and why there is no swimming pool

Muzamil asks whether Beverly Hills is an apartment building or an Airbnb play. Danyal’s answer is a third category. “It is actually a new concept which I call experiential living.”

The problem he says he diagnosed during his USC masters was specific: well-settled Pakistani families who want a second residence in the north cannot find a decent one, and if they do it is overpriced and plagued with plumbing issues. His response is a building that serves two kinds of buyer. The buyer who wants a private family retreat gets full automation and remote camera access from Faisalabad, Lahore or Karachi. The buyer who wants a rental yield is given a documented rental program with projected numbers. “It is about creating the win-win situation.”

Danyal is direct about the trade-off he made on amenities. There is no swimming pool. “Log three-d bana detay hain pool ki and kehtay hain hamaray paas pool hai, apartment lay lo. They cannot manage it.” Pressure issues in the Murree terrain, COVID hygiene concerns and a real privacy problem all pointed away from a shared pool. Instead, there is a bookable exclusive spa — a small room reserved for a single family for a single time slot — that is a direct port of the Ritz-Carlton spa that left its mark on him. The framing he uses is simple: “Undercommit, overdeliver.”

He also pre-empts the obvious critique of foreign-name borrowing in Pakistani real estate. “Pakistan mein trend hai bahar ke naam use karnay hain. They don’t have a story. They are not inspired with and most of them have not visited that place.” Beverly Hills, in his telling, is earned. He lived in California during his USC masters. The logo is an ibex, Pakistan’s national animal. The interior themes — a rustic mountain theme and a “Hollywood glam” theme for the modern buyer — are part of the integration. The floors are named after LA beaches: Manhattan Beach, San Diego. The rooftop is Sunset Boulevard. “Its soul is Pakistan but inspiration is from California.”

The hotel-room investment trap

A short but sharp passage covers the rise of fractional hotel-room investment schemes from operators like Pearl Continental and Bahria. Muzamil sketches the model: an investor buys a room inside a resort, the original developer operates it as a hotel, the investor gets a lump sum yield and twenty-one days of personal use per year.

Danyal sees a structural problem. “You don’t have any designated space. Ho sakta hai ke agar maine room book kiya ho, woh usme main reh raha hoon. You have no power over it.” His framing is that those products are built for the investor and not the end user. Muzamil extends the thought into the resale problem: the next buyer of a hotel room is a question mark, while a tangible apartment is something you actually own and can pass on. The whole exchange is a clean illustration of the difference between a financial product dressed up as real estate and real estate itself.

Nineteen-twenty is actually eighty-ninety

The most quotable stretch of the conversation is on execution. Muzamil names the failure mode that any Pakistani client will recognise: the contractor who says “sir hum tabedaar hain” but who quietly lays a crooked line and shrugs that it is “unnees-bees” — nineteen-twenty, a Pakistani phrase for “close enough.”

Danyal’s response is the cleanest argument in the episode. “Unnees-bees is actually eighty-ninety.” The personal eye of the worker is not calibrated to what a high-end client expects. The owner who is not on site every day will inherit the gap. He visits the project regularly, watches the steel, watches the raft, watches the pours. “If the owner is not fully involved, your project will not be perfect.”

He extends this into the broader question of why Pakistani projects deliver late. The answer is not on-site time. It is planning time. “You spend ten percent time planning, you will save so much time in execution.” He uses Building Information Modeling — electrical, plumbing, architectural and mechanical layers synced — so that the pipe routing problem a developer would normally discover a year in is visible on an iPad on day one. He is clear that BIM is rare in Pakistan, and that this is exactly why he is using it.

He is also unsentimental about how Pakistani workers explain delays. “Every person comes and tells you sir, my work is compromised because dus hazaar missile and life crisis. I can empathise with that. But your work is your work. You have to deliver it.”

3D printing belongs to the middle class

When Muzamil asks whether Danyal has seen any real innovation in Pakistani construction, the conversation pivots to a part of his roadmap he has not yet executed. While in the US, he was tracking a company in Texas building 3D-printed homes — a roughly fifteen-hundred-square-foot house for around six thousand dollars in twenty-four hours. He wanted to set up the first 3D-printed housing colony in Pakistan.

The constraint is honest. He is “a marketing branding person,” not an engineer. The path forward, when it comes, will be a joint venture with a serious 3D printing company. The capex of moving and training around the printer is significant, and the economics only work at volume.

The framing he insists on is the important part. “Three-d printing is not for the high elite people. It is for low to medium income people.” A fifteen-hundred-square-foot home with a proper bedroom and lounge, delivered fast and cheap, gives a Pakistani middle-income family the standard of living that an upper-class buyer takes for granted. He references the Chinese twenty-storey-in-thirty-days videos, and Chinese hospitals built in COVID, and concedes the limit: “Not every country is ready for every technology. You need the ecosystem.” For now, he is exploring prefabricated systems from China and Turkey for his next project, planned for Attabad Lake in Hunza, where extreme weather makes insulation a real engineering question.

A community, not a unit sale

A short stretch of the conversation covers Danyal’s refusal to sell through Zameen.com. He has sold forty-five percent of Beverly Hills without a dealer network. The portal call came in, he turned it down. The reason is not pricing. “First of all, I will have no control. And my goal is to make an exclusive community.”

Muzamil reads it back to him cleanly. “What you’re trying to do is, you sold a product. Product eventually banegi. Jab woh ban jayegi, when those community people use it, on its word-of-mouth you’ll do the rest.” Danyal agrees. “My strategy is word-of-mouth.” The pressure that introduces, Muzamil notes, is enormous. Word-of-mouth only works if delivery exceeds promise. Danyal frames it as the only honest path: “I want to exceed their expectations.”

He also flags a quiet hiring choice. His project architect is a woman. “Specifically in Faisalabad, har jagah aadmiyon ka bahut hota hai. Give an opportunity to the women around you and see if they can make a difference.”

Lamhay.com and the imported-phobia

The lamhay.com thread comes back near the middle of the episode. Danyal’s diagnosis is that Pakistanis under-value Pakistani art. “Yahan par log usko value nahi kartay hain — yaar Pakistani cheez hai. Imported cheez dekho. Yeh imported ka kya phobia hai?” The artists he met during COVID were good at art and bad at the business of art. He is good at branding, marketing and packaging. The platform is the bridge.

Muzamil adds a personal data point — his brother visiting from the US looking at premium Pakistani paintings priced at two-fifty or three hundred dollars that would sell for five to ten thousand in the US, and giving up only because transport was painful. Danyal’s next steps are pointed at exactly that: a US trip the following month, retail-store presentations, and a longer roadmap that takes the catalogue international. “I want to show them what value Pakistan can add to your store.”

The connection-versus-relationship lesson

A short detour, but a load-bearing one. Danyal credits a three-day conference in Silicon Valley during his AU years for one specific reframe. “Life is not about connections, it’s about relationships.” Muzamil asks him to expand for a Pakistani audience that is genuinely obsessed with LinkedIn and Facebook adds. Danyal is blunt. A Jeff Bezos follow, hypothetically, means nothing. “He doesn’t know you. He doesn’t care about you.” A business card from a conference is also not an achievement. “My achievement is what I learn from him and what he could learn from me.” Connections fade. Relationships compound.

Pakistan in 2050, and the grassroot tax

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks how Danyal sees Pakistan in 2050. The answer is split. On business, Danyal is bullish. “Literally yahan par itni opportunities hain, itna mazaa aata hai kaam karnay ka.” On civic life, he is not. “As a nation, I think we’re going downhill.”

He is also unsparing about the grassroot corruption that ethical operators have to pay around. Land letters held up for payment. An approval deliberately delayed past the deadline of Imran Khan’s construction incentive package because the official knew Danyal needed it. The need for a local fixer who can deal in the local idiom because a Faisalabadi outsider gets quietly milked. “If I spend time figuring out these problems, I cannot think of the next project or the next business.”

Muzamil’s closing reframe is the one Danyal agrees with. The leaders are a representation of the people, not separate from them. A nation that throws chips wrappers on the road cannot outsource the cleanup to a prime minister. Danyal closes the thought with a sentence that lands harder than its length suggests: “I think as more time passes, it should be more difficult to raise children who are ethical and who want to do things the right way. It’s not impossible. It will be more challenging.”

Muzamil wraps the conversation at the forty-eight minute mark, with a dry disclosure that the episode is not sponsored by Beverly Hills Residence — “although, I wouldn’t mind an apartment if I get to it” — and a promise from Danyal to invite him when the model apartment is ready.