Working with architects and designers

An architect is the most consequential hire on a custom home after the builder, and the selection criteria are less obvious.

Matching to your project

Look at built work rather than renderings, and look specifically for work on sites like yours and at budgets like yours. An architect whose portfolio is flat urban infill may be excellent and still be learning on your steep foothills parcel.

Colorado sites bring specific problems: slope, snow load, wildfire-resistant construction, high UV exposure, and wide daily temperature swings. Experience with those is not interchangeable with experience elsewhere.

Fee structures

Fees are typically a percentage of construction cost, a fixed fee, or hourly. Each has a bias worth understanding. Percentage of construction cost means the fee rises as the project gets more expensive. Fixed fee means the architect absorbs the cost of revisions beyond an agreed scope, which makes it important to know how many revisions the fee covers.

Agree on that revision count before you start. It is the single most common source of friction in the design phase.

Bringing the builder in early

Design-bid-build, where drawings are completed and then priced, produces the situation where a completed design comes back over budget and has to be reworked.

Involving a builder during design, even informally, lets cost feedback arrive while changes are still cheap. Some architects resist this and some prefer it. Ask which, early.

What to bring to the first meeting

A budget you mean, a site, and a list of how you live rather than a list of rooms. Architects solve the second better than they solve the first, and the good ones will tell you when your program and your budget are not the same project.