RESIDENTIAL DESIGN PROCESS
In providing you Conceptual Residential Design Services, we will do these things together:
• Explore what you are seeking to achieve for your residential home (your needs and wants) so that we can create a successful design efficiently. A deep dive into your project goals, site characteristics, budget, project constraints, and opportunities, balancing and optimizing the design for all variables.
• Understand what your residential build should be and strategize about how to design it so that you will enjoy living in it and for years to come.
• Optimize every opportunity for your home, getting your design correct now so that time and money can be saved as you move the design to the next phase of your build. Uncover strategies to save time and money in the process.
• Document the process, our observations and motivations, and the design into a comprehensive Conceptual Design Portfolio where all assumptions and correspondence that lead to the final conceptual design are referenced.
We will do this in an efficient, detailed way making sure we explore various scenarios and finding out what will work best for you, your site, your budget, and your life.
The Concept Design Process consists of two phases: Pre-Design and Design.
PRE-DESIGN
1. ENGAGE
2. SELF-REFLECTION
3. SYNTHESIZE
4. ANALYZE
Our initial engagement is a chance to gather information about you, your project, what you are seeking, and whether we would be a good fit for each other. Together we will define our scope of services and fee, including any additional services. Signing a Design Agreement and submitting a down payment kicks off the start of our Residential Conceptual Design Services.
During this step in the process, we will be providing you a Pre-Design questionnaire and going over this with you. This questionnaire provides you the questions that you need to think through, and it will guide you to organize your thoughts, but also provide us your information in a concise way that allows us to further break down your desires. We call this phase self-reflection as the questions will prompt you to answer some challenging questions up front, but then guide you through the details we need to consider when we meet to formalize the initial parameters of your design. The questionnaire must be completed in electronic form and needs to be returned to us prior to our next meeting. We are open to questions during this phase, but we encourage you to answer with your gut as well as with all the ideas you have collected to this point.
Using your responses to a Pre-Design questionnaire, we synthesize your answers and ideas into a cohesive Project Brief & Program document that gets to the heart of what you aim to create and summarizes your overarching goals, intentions, and motivations for the project.
We analyze components of the project as they relate to the project requirements. This includes analysis of the site, program, budget, and massing. We strategize about the location, size, relationship, and configuration of spaces in various organizational schemes to better understand what is possible.
DESIGN
5. INITIAL DESIGN
6. REFINE
7. DELIVERABLE
We use all the information learned in the Pre-Design phase and create an initial design that begins to conceptualize the project to meet your project goals. We create variations to learn what you like and dislike and incorporate this input into the refined design.
We refine the design based on your feedback and develop a concept design that is cohesive, thoughtful, and specific to you. We prepare 2D and 3D design drawings that help convey the design intent and allow you to visualize the concept. There are modifications we will pursue with your feedback as well as potentially some pro-forma design changes that allow you to feel the design. The end result of this step is to allow you to sign off on the design and allow us to move toward fully documenting the “Conceptual Design Portfolio.”
The process concludes with a delivering your final Conceptual Design Portfolio. This includes the Concept Design Package, Project Summary, Project Next Steps, and a detailed Project Analysis. We summarize and organize all the information, ideas, and resources we have discovered together into a comprehensive document that describes your project inside and out to your designer, drafter, or builder.
