Getting the shape of the whole thing — the stages, the drawings, the approvals — before you have to decide anything.
What does an architect actually do? It's a fair question, and you're probably asking it having never built anything before. You're about to commit a great deal of time and money to something you'll do once or twice in your life.
What makes that harder than it needs to be is the vocabulary. Prime cost, provisional sum, setback, site cover, DA, BA, RFI. Nobody hands it to you, so you end up approving things in words you were never given.
So here is the shape of it: five stages and one before them, what happens in each, and what you have in your hands at the end. Use it with me or with someone else. I'd rather you asked a good question of another architect than a vague one of me.
Each stage builds on the last. By the end the house has been decided in detail, before anyone picks up a tool.
Building is one of the largest purchases you'll ever make and one of the very few you'll make without prior experience. The vocabulary alone can keep you out of decisions you're paying for. Knowing it makes you quicker and more decisive.
You stop feeling like the only person in the room who doesn't know what a setback is. Confidence here turns into decisiveness later, and decisiveness is what keeps a project moving.
You pick the vocabulary up as you go, usually at the moment a decision with real money attached is already on the table. On a small, familiar job that's manageable. On a bigger one, the questions you don't ask become the assumptions nobody checks.
This guide is the answer to that, and it's yours to keep whether or not we work together. I'm not holding the vocabulary back to keep you dependent on me. At the start of your project I'll set out the stages, what each one produces, what it costs and what a realistic programme looks like for your house. Each project is different, so you get yours.
The drawings are the visible part — most of the work is the thinking behind them and the coordination that keeps them true. In practice it's five things. Working out what you're actually asking for. Designing to your site rather than to a catalogue. Documenting it so a builder can price and build it without inventing anything. Coordinating the engineer, surveyor, planner, energy assessor and certifier so their work still agrees with itself. And staying involved on site while several hundred small decisions get made.
Broadly the same everywhere, with slightly different names. Pre-design, where your house is measured and the planning rules checked. Concept design, where the shape of the thing is decided. Design development, where it's resolved and, if a Development Application is needed, lodged. Construction documentation, the full drawing set and specification a builder prices from. Then choosing a builder, and staying alongside the work while it's built.
Longer than the drawing time suggests, and each project is different. What moves it is what you'd expect: whether a Development Application is needed, how quickly council assesses it, how long builder pricing takes, and when a good builder can start. I'll give you a realistic programme for your house at the outset and keep it updated as the real dates land. Knowing the shape of it early is what makes the quiet stretches easy to live with.
Stage by stage is the arrangement I'd argue for, and it's a common one. Each stage is quoted before it begins and invoiced once it's finished, so you see what you're getting before you commit to the next. You'll have the whole picture in writing before the first stage starts, and nothing in it will be a surprise.
If you would rather start small, the First Sketch Session is two hours at your place. You keep the sketches, and there is no obligation afterwards.
