The first meeting is a strange sort of interview. You are deciding whether to trust a stranger with the most personal building you will ever own. They are deciding whether your project is real, and whether they are the right people for it. Good questions on both sides save everyone a year of polite disappointment.
Here are the ones worth asking us, or any architect you are considering. None of them are about style. You can see style on a website. These are the questions that tell you how the work is actually run.
Who will actually be on my project?
At a lot of practices the person who charms you at the first meeting is not the person who draws your house or stands on your site. Ask directly. Who designs it, who details it, who is there in the rain when the steel arrives. At this studio the answer is the same person from the first conversation to the last snag, and that is deliberate, but you should make every architect tell you plainly.
What would you not do here?
A good architect has opinions and will share them before you have signed anything. If everything you suggest is met with enthusiasm, be careful. You want someone who will tell you, kindly, that the enormous glass box you have seen online will cook in summer and feel like a fish tank in winter. The first meeting is where you find out whether they will push back.
How do you charge, and what is realistic to build?
Ask about fees plainly, and ask them to be plain back. Architects’ fees are usually a percentage of the construction cost, agreed up front. The more important number is the build cost, and a good architect will give you an honest range at the first meeting rather than an optimistic one designed to win the job. If a budget will not stretch to the house you are describing, you want to hear that now, not in a year.
Can I speak to someone whose house you finished?
Photographs are the easy part. Ask to speak to a past client, ideally one whose project was difficult. How were the hard moments handled. Did the architect stay in the room when things went wrong. The studios worth hiring are happy to put you in touch, because most of their work comes through exactly those conversations.
“You are not choosing a drawing. You are choosing the person who will be standing in your half-built house when a decision has to be made and you are not there.”
And the questions worth asking yourself
Before the meeting, get clear on a few things. What is the house for, in plain words. Who lives in it now and who will in ten years. What is the one thing the current house gets wrong that you would pay almost anything to fix. You do not need answers to all of it. But the clearer you are, the faster a good architect can tell you whether they can help.
If you would like that first conversation, you can get in touch here. It costs nothing, and you can read more about how the studio works first.