TREO’s early work centered on homes between 3,000 and 6,000 square feet. A decade on, the firm routinely builds up to 20,000 square feet for a clientele that now includes as many domestic buyers relocating from other states as international ones.

The clearest evidence of that growth sits in two recent oceanfront projects. On Broadview Drive in Bay Harbor Islands, an 8,000-square-foot, two-story home overlooking Indian Creek — its floating staircase rising past a temperature-controlled wine wall, water threading from the entrance feature down into the pool — sold for $21.95 million in April 2024, a record for the area. TREO’s newest work, a 17,507-square-foot home at 255 Ocean Boulevard in Golden Beach completed this year, pushes further: a façade of natural stone and greenery with no stucco, 23-foot ceilings at the entrance, a sculptural travertine staircase, and a primary suite finished in oak with a soaking tub carved from a single block of stone. Halfen is already looking past both, toward a run of oceanfront homes organized around cold plunges, saunas, and lap pools that treat the Atlantic as an extension of the house rather than a view of it.

Before any of that, Halfen earned a BS in Economics from the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, an MS in Engineering Economic Systems from Stanford, and an MBA from Columbia. That training underpins his other seat at the table: he joined Inelectra, the Venezuelan engineering and construction firm, in 1997 as an analyst, and has served as Director of its Administrative Board since 2006. Inelectra ranks among the fifty largest companies in the global hydrocarbon and energy sector, and among the three largest in Latin America, with the capacity to run contracts up to $300 million and take direct stakes in projects as large as $1.3 billion — executed from centers in Venezuela and Mexico for clients across the Americas, the Middle East, and Europe.