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Designing a Custom Residence:
The first step is to schedule an introduction meeting at our office. This gives us the opportunity to meet with you personally and discuss the elements of design that you want in your new home. It also provides the opportunity to show how we can assist you in achieving a design that will incorporate these elements. |
We encourage bringing clippings, photographs, sketches or anything else that conveys the design ideas that you may want to include in your home. We firmly believe that we must satisfy the needs of everybody who is going to live in the newly finished home. If you have already selected a builder, interior decorator, or a landscape architect or designer, please feel free to include them in this meeting.
If your home is being designed for a piece of property that has been or will be purchased, you will need to obtain a current survey of the property showing the property lines. The survey can usually be found with the information from your mortgage closing. We will also need to know what the current zoning setbacks are for the property. This can be obtained from your local zoning board. As most county zoning offices are very busy, you cannot rely on getting this by telephone. This often requires a trip to your local courthouse to obtain correct information.
After discussing the style and elements that you want, we will discuss a schedule and estimated fee for the design. Once you have decided to hire us to design your home, we will need a signed copy of our contract, a copy of the survey of your property and a retainer. Our retainer is one third of the estimated cost of the design of your home. At this point we consider you a client of our firm and will begin working with you on the preliminary plans for your new home.
The Preliminary Design Phase:
The Preliminary Plans are conceptual drawings that show the spatial arrangement of the floor plan, the exterior appearance, the roof layout and how your new home relates to its site and surrounding environment.
The Site Visit: To begin we will need to have a meeting at the site. During this meeting we can discuss how to situate your house on the site. We will discuss such factors as views, daylight basement space, automobile access, relationship to neighboring homes and drainage. We can also include a landscape Architect in this meeting to begin integrating the landscape design into the project.
The Preliminary Design: This is the portion of the design process where we take all of the ideas and parameters for your home and begin weaving them into a design. We will begin with concept sketches.
Presentation of The Preliminary Design: Once we have a preliminary concept sketch we will meet with you to make sure that we are heading in the right direction. Once all parties have agreed on the Preliminary Sketches we will begin with the production of The Preliminary Drawings on our Cad program. By constructing the site plan on Cad we can fit the house exactly to your site. You will be kept abreast of the progress with faxed computer printouts. These drawings will include the front elevation, first floor plan, second floor plan, roof layout and site plan. During this process we would encourage the participation of your builder and landscape architect. When you are satisfied with the design, we will ask for approval of the preliminary drawings before proceeding to the Construction Drawing Phase. At this time we would require the second payment of the design fee before proceeding.
The Construction Drawing Phase:
The Construction Drawings contain all of the information that your builder will need to permit and build your new home (minus interior design). These drawings include the site plan, first floor, second floor, roof plan, and basement\foundation plans as well as the front rear and side elevations and at least one wall section. Additional details will be included as necessary to insure that the builder and his sub-contractors understand how the house is to be built. We are very conscientious about the construction details, so that your house comes out the way that we intended it to look. We require the final payment of our design fee on the completion of the construction drawings. Mechanical, Electrical and Plumbing are usually not required but are available as an additional service.
We believe that an aesthetically pleasing design must not only look good on paper, but must be translatable into a three-dimensional structure as well.
Construction Supervision:
The site visits to review the progress of construction and provide written reports are done as an additional service at the rate of $400.00 per visit. These are done at the request of the client. We recommend at least once per month.
