The massive project was awarded in a joint venture. SSI was responsible for the design of all the services which included the roads, stormwater, sewer and water services. “I used Civil Designer’s sewer house connection functionality extensively during the design phase when checking the drainage for the erven. It’s a fantastic function and saved us a lot of time.”

“The stormwater design was particularly tricky. One half of the estate had a flat terrain with poor drainage while the other half had steep slopes with deep valleys. We also had to look at getting the roads to drain correctly with the stormwater drainage system and found the flat areas to be a challenge,” he explains.

The ecologically-crafted Wedgewood Estate had many environmental restrictions. Indigenous species had to be preserved where possible and blue gum trees had to be phased out over a number of years, making way for the indigenous trees.

According to Andre, in keeping with the environmental commitment, treated effluent water was reclaimed and used to irrigate the tees, greens and fairways. A subsoil drainage system was also used to allow the reuse of much of the run-off and seepage water from the course. “We used a lot of channelling in the stormwater design to maximise infiltration and reduce run-off. We tried as far as possible to retain water on the site and added an additional five dams to the existing four to increase the stormwater retention and storage.”

Civil Designer was used to design the roads, water, sewers and stormwater systems. “I have no complaints about the software and I am impressed with the improvements and new developments in the software since I first used it in 2003. With this project we had a special water management program in place.”

Sewer effluent from the residential site will be treated to a high standard and then filtered through the dams system for irrigation. We also negotiated with St Albans prison for a further 600 kl of water per day so that this could be filtered through the treatment plant to meet the water demand for irrigation. Combined we have a total of 1,5 million litres of water for irrigation per day,” explains Andre, adding that a golf course of this size required between 1,5 and 1,8 mega litres of water per day for irrigation.

The development will create over 200 jobs during the construction phase and 1000 permanent jobs once completed. The golf course and club house will open its doors on 15 December 2008 with all three phases likely to be occupied and fully built by 2010.

"Wedgewood Village will be an Estate like no other and will consist of 840 architecturally designed homes with a range of exclusive on-estate amenities. The 486 plots along the golf course currently retails at between R500 000 and R1,8-million and 70% of these have already been sold,” he says proudly.