About
Builder. Navigator. Adventurer.
I'm Karel Olde Meule — the person behind Kiriakos Services & Consulting. Kiriakos, loosely translated, is the closest Greek equivalent to Karel — a small personal signature woven into the business name. I grew up in Amersfoort, in a family where taking responsibility and seeing things through were simply how you did things. That's stuck with me ever since.
Professionally, I hold a Bachelor Build Environment (BBE) degree and I'm a certified PRINCE2 Practitioner, with a strong, long-standing focus on safety management — both in how I think and how I work, including extensive experience with machine safety processes and requirements. Over almost fifteen years as a technical and project manager, I worked on a wide range of projects for clients including Rijkswaterstaat, ProRail, and various provinces and municipalities — from site management and coordinating crews on location, to the heavy lifting and transport work that big renovation projects inevitably involve.
I'm known for reading a complicated situation quickly, bringing structure where a project has stalled, and making a clear call once the key parameters are in. A good part of that experience is in incident and emergency-response projects: stabilising the situation immediately, then working out how to make it right for the long term afterwards. I'm a no-nonsense, to-the-point person, and that's how I've always worked — quick to see what a situation actually needs, and not much patience for talking around it.
Building is about details — I've always said that, and it's still how I look at every job.
Ask me what I actually do, and it comes down to this: I fix things that are old or broken — in the broadest sense, from a small repair to a major renovation. After years of managing that kind of work from a distance, I wanted to get closer to it again — and not narrow myself to just one role. Kiriakos Services & Consulting is built around that idea: the same technical standard and project discipline, applied across three flexible lines, delivered in a more direct, pragmatic way.
The move to Samos wasn't a sudden decision — it grew over several years of visits, where the island's freedom, simplicity, and connection to the sea kept pulling at me. When it got serious, I gave it the same treatment I'd give any project: a sober look at what was actually realistic — living here, working remotely, the finances, and how it would combine with a project of my own: restoring an old steel sailboat I call Kon-Tiki, a Scheldeschouw Grand Tour, ketch-rigged. The analysis held up, so I went ahead with it.
These days that boat project, island-hopping around the Aegean, and the occasional renovation project of my own sit alongside the client work — alongside a healthy dose of curiosity for what's over the next hill, or just past the harbour.
Home, these days, is shared with two cats, Kiddy and Asher — one of them a Samos native himself, taken in as a newborn kitten I couldn't leave behind.
