In brief
There are two normal starting positions. Some people come to me with a finished design and an architect – then I come in as the builder. Others have an outline of a house in their head and not much more: no design, and sometimes no plot. This text is for the second group. In that case I start with a conversation: how you want to live, where, within what budget, and how much you want to be involved in the whole process. After that the order is fixed: the plot, a feasibility study, the studio and the design, the permit, the build, the fit-out down to the bed linen. I run all of it and I answer to you for all of it, the design included – although the design itself is drawn by the architect, and I organise it. You do not need to prepare anything for the first conversation.
Two routes to the same house
Most conversations about a residence begin with a design. Someone has an architect, has drawings, sometimes already has a permit – and is looking for somebody to build it. What I do in that case and when it makes most sense to bring me in, I described in the piece for people who have a design and an architect, so I will not repeat it here.
There is a second group, and very little gets written for them. People who know how they want to live but do not yet have anything that could be put on the table. No drawing. Sometimes a plot, sometimes only the area where they would like to look for one. And, quite often, the belief that you are only supposed to approach a contractor once you have a design, because otherwise there is nothing to talk about.
There is. In this situation I am the one who organises the whole thing: the plot, the studio, the design, the permit, the build, the fit-out. I do not draw the design, because that is the architect’s job, but I organise it and I am responsible for making sure it can be built for the price and by the date you know before the start. The house at the end is the same. Only the beginning looks different: who gathers the people, and in what order the decisions are made.
First the conversation, then the drawing
For seven years my wife and I ran an interior architecture office. A meeting with a client usually took us between an hour and a half and two and a half hours, and from the outside it looked like a relaxed chat over coffee. On my side of the table lay a long questionnaire – only I did not go through it in order, because the human head does not work that way: someone talks about the kitchen, halfway through a sentence the bedroom comes to mind, then they go back to the kitchen. The client did not see me jumping between pages. My job was to catch everything.
That is exactly what the first conversation about a residence looks like today. I do not expect a functional programme or a list of rooms with floor areas. I ask how you want to live: who will be in this house every day and who only on occasion; whether you work from home and whether guests are supposed to know where; where it has to be quiet; whether the kitchen is for cooking or mainly for looking at; how many cars; whether the pool is for swimming in the morning or for guests in the evening. I ask this carefully for a reason. I have heard from clients, after they moved in, that the house turned out too big many times. That it turned out too small – once. From answers like these the brief for the architect is written later. A list of rooms with areas is not enough for an architect – the architect has to know what each room is for and how it will be used, because only from that does it follow what the room should be.
Three more things I want to know. Where – whether the plot already exists or we are still looking for it, and in which area. What order of magnitude of budget we are working with – roughly, so that I know whether I am the right address at all. And how much you want to be involved: some people want to decide on every tile, others want two options and an hour to choose. Both are fine; they are simply organised differently.
One reservation up front, so that there is no surprise: you will not walk out of that conversation with a price or a completion date, because neither exists yet. They come out of the feasibility study and the documentation, which I describe below. What we do sign before we get into specifics is a confidentiality agreement. I do not want to know the address of the plot until that agreement is signed.
Where to start building a residence – what I take on, in order
The order below is not accidental. With a catalogue house you can start with the design and look for a plot to fit it. With a residence you cannot, because the design is made for a specific piece of land: for its water, its ground, its local zoning plan, its sun and its neighbours. The architect designs on data. Every assumption made instead of data turns into a rework later – on paper, if you are lucky.
The plot
If the plot already exists, I vet it before the first line of the concept is drawn: ground and water, the local zoning plan or the planning decision, spare capacity in the power grid, access for heavy plant, the neighbourhood today and what the plan allows to be built next door tomorrow. What exactly I check, and in what order, is in the piece on vetting a plot for a residence.
If there is no plot – I look for one. I have been finding plots for clients for years, and it rarely looks like browsing listings. It is phone calls to municipal offices, conversations with the neighbours of land that is not for sale at all, driving around the area with a map and the national geoportal, sometimes tracking down the owner of a piece of land that nobody nearby can say anything about. (Once, with nothing but a surname from the land register, I went around the neighbourhood looking for the owner of a narrow strip of land by the road, because a client needed his consent for a water pipe.)
Before any piece of land makes it onto the list, I check two things. Whether the local zoning plan allows a house like this – height, roof, how much of the plot may be built on, how much must stay green – because neither the architect nor I can change the plan. And whether there is a plan at all. A plot without one raises more questions today than a plot with one: the rules for issuing planning decisions are changing, including in which parts of a municipality one can apply for them at all, and whether you can apply before the land is yours. Residences like to stand where there is little other development, and those are precisely the places where the changing rules are least forgiving. So for a residence I prefer a plan that allows such a house in black and white, and I check the planning status as of the day of the decision. The legal side is your lawyer’s to check.
Surveys and documents I commission before the deed, with the owner’s consent; a clause allowing you to walk away on bad results can be agreed in the preliminary contract, and that is already the lawyer’s work. Then I sit down to the negotiations on your side: with the survey results, with what the plan allows, with a priced cost for the things the seller calls minor. You buy – at the notary, with your own lawyer. I am not a party to that transaction and I do not represent the seller. My role ends when what lies on the table before you sign is survey results and calculated costs, rather than the seller’s assurances that everything can be sorted out.
The feasibility study
Once there is a plot – yours, or the one we are choosing – I start the feasibility study. It is the first stage at which something goes down on paper, and it is still not a design. Ground and water investigation under the planned footprint. Your idea of how you want to live set against what the plan and the land allow. The special elements identified – pool, car lift, spa area, everything that needs power, drainage and room in the structure from the very beginning. Risks and possibilities. Out of that comes the answer to whether the house in your head can stand on this land and within this budget – and, if not entirely, what has to change.
There is still no price at this stage – a binding one only comes out of the detailed documentation and the take-offs. What there is, is the first thing anything can be based on: we know what we are building and on what. Where a price that does not change along the way comes from, I explain separately, in the piece on the lump sum.
The studio and the design
I do not draw the design. That is the architect’s job, and it is good that it stays that way: you want a house designed by someone who designs houses every day. I build them.
So what do I do? We choose the studio together: I suggest two or three, to suit the character of the house in your head and to suit whether they can work with a builder at the table from the first concept. I write the brief from our conversation and from the study. And then I am at the table from the first sketch, as the person who is going to build it. A residence usually means eight to a dozen-plus design disciplines: architecture, structure, services, ventilation, automation, pool technology, lighting, security, interiors. Each draws its own set. My work is to make those drawings collide with each other on the desk rather than on site, and to have the interior design produced as part of the documentation, because without it the electrician does not know where the bed will stand.
The difference from the first route is simple. When you come with a finished design, I read it from the builder’s side after the fact, and some of the comments already carry a cost – redesign, sometimes a return to the authorities. When the design takes shape with me watching, the same comments come up at concept stage, and then the fix is a few strokes of the architect’s pen, with no redesign and no trip back to the permit office. A pool plant room the equipment will not fit into in one piece; a lift shaft with no way in for the service engineer; pool-hall ventilation ducts nobody left room for in the slab – things like that come out on the desk. The architect remains the author of the design, and the architect is the one who decides on changes to it. I am responsible for making sure that what has been drawn can be built and costed before we step onto the site.
I once joked that time runs differently in architecture studios than it does for the rest of us (I ran an interiors office myself, so I know it first-hand). With a residence the joke stops being a joke, for a different reason: from the first conversation with a studio to a complete set of documents you can walk onto site with, usually more than a year passes. Concept, permit design, technical and detailed design, the disciplines, the interiors, the approvals, the authorities. In that time the house is being thought through, and it is the only stage at which every change is still cheap. The roughly two years of construction, which I laid out in the piece on why a residence takes two years, begin only after that.
The permit and the paperwork
The building permit is issued to you, because you are the investor. I handle the paperwork as your authorised representative: some of it already at concept stage, such as the grid connection conditions and the survey map for design purposes, and later the application itself, the approvals and the dealings with the authorities. What comes back to you are the signatures nobody can provide on your behalf – above all the declaration that you have the right to use the land for construction purposes. The authorities have 65 days by statute to issue the decision, except that the clock stops at every request to complete the file, and such a letter usually does arrive and is not the architect’s fault. I put it into the schedule from the outset.
The build and the fit-out
Then comes the build, around two years, and the fit-out down to the bed linen – which is what most of the other texts in this section are about. Every phone call from the site comes to me. Every Friday you get a report: what has been done, what is ahead, how we are doing against the plan. The decisions that remain on your side come to you with options, and early enough that none of them is left waiting for you on site.
Why talk before anything exists
There are two reasons, and both have to do with the calendar.
The first: the things it is tempting to settle on your own before the conversation – the plot, the studio, the concept – are exactly the decisions that are hardest to undo later. A plot bought without a ground investigation comes back as a foundation nobody planned for. A concept drawn without data on the land comes back as a redesign. Nobody made a mistake there. At the beginning there is simply no way of knowing what to ask, and that is why the people for ground, maps and design are gathered before the land is bought, not when the excavator is being ordered. A conversation in which nothing has been decided yet gives me the most, because everything can still be set right.
The second reason is prosaic: I start one new build a year. A full build takes around two years, so at any given moment I am running at most two – that is as many sites as I can supervise in person. If you come with an idea, that year and more for the plot, the design and the permit and my next free window tend to line up: by the time the documentation is ready, a site frees up. If you come with a permit already in hand, there is usually a wait. That is why I prefer to talk early.
What I do not promise
A price or a date at the first conversation. Both come out of documentation; what comes out of a conversation is at most an order of magnitude and a list of questions.
A plot that has everything. A view, a plan that allows such a house, power in the grid, access, quiet, and the certainty that nobody will build behind your fence in a few years – such land exists, rarely, and usually it is not for sale. Most often you have to choose what to give up, and it is better for that conversation to happen before anyone signs a deed.
That I will design the house. The name under the design is the architect’s; mine is under the build. Nor am I a lawyer: the purchase of the plot, the contract with the studio and the rights to the design are things your lawyer should see before you sign. Ideally he comes to the conversation with you.
When this route is not worth it
If you already have an architect you trust and a design you like – that is the first route, and it is just as good; there is no point in rebuilding it from scratch. If you would rather choose the studio without me and come only once the design exists – that is fine too, it is your house. I will ask one thing: call before the concept, because then I can still suggest what to ask the studio before the things that cost money later are locked in.
What I ask at the first conversation
You do not need to bring anything. But if you want to know what the conversation will be about, it is this:
- How you want to live in this house – who will be in it every day, who on occasion, where it has to be quiet, what should be close together and what far apart.
- What already exists – a plot, an area, sketches, photos of houses you like, a wish list on a napkin. Or nothing. That is a normal situation too.
- The special elements – pool, car lift, spa, rooms that appear on no publicly available drawing, a helipad. They decide the plot and the structure, so I ask about them straight away.
- The order of magnitude of the budget, so that I know whether I am the right address.
- How involved you want to be – which decisions you want to make yourself and which to hand over with options to choose from.
- Who else decides – in the house and outside it. You can come with the person who will be choosing this house with you, and with a lawyer or an adviser.
- When you want to move in, so that we can lay three calendars side by side straight away: the design, the build, and my next free window.
Questions about working with me – from the first conversation to the settlement model – I answer in the Questions section.
Frequently asked questions
I have no design and no plot. Is it too early to talk to a contractor?
No. It is a good moment, because nothing has been decided yet: not the land, not the studio, not what goes below ground. Everything you settle without me I will later be reading after the fact, and some of it will already carry a cost. An outline of the house in your head is enough for the first conversation.
Does a general contractor help find a plot for a residence?
In my case, yes: finding it, vetting it and negotiating the purchase. I look beyond the listings, I vet the land before purchase (ground, water, zoning, power, access, neighbourhood) and I sit down to the negotiations on your side. You buy, at the notary, with your own lawyer. I am not a party to the transaction and I do not represent the seller.
Do I need an architect to get started?
No. If you have one, good, we work together. If you do not, we choose the studio together to suit the character of the house in your head, and I run it through the whole design. The architect remains the author of the design. I am responsible for making sure it can be built for the price and by the date you will know before the start.
How long is the road from idea to keys?
Two stages have to be counted, one after the other. Design and permit – for a residence usually more than a year, because there are a dozen or so disciplines, plus the detailed design and the interiors, and the authorities at the end. Then around two years of construction, counted from stepping onto the site. You cannot read your own house’s completion date off that (it comes out of the specific documentation), but you can already see why a conversation a year early is not a conversation too early.
If the house so far exists only in your head, this is exactly the moment. Let’s talk about your project.