168 Clinton St. -- Getting the project off the ground: To Architect or not To Architect
- By Noreen Adler
- Published 05/7/2008
Noreen Adler
Founder and President, Ecobrownstone
Noreen is Founder and President of Ecobrownstone. She has been a resident of brownstone Brooklyn (Park Slope, Brooklyn Heights and Carroll Gardens) for over two decades and has planned, designed and managed a wide range of renovation and real estate development projects in Brooklyn and elsewhere. As a developer she is a member of the NYC Committee evaluating the LEED for Homes Guidelines for application in New York. She also has a personal passion for sculptural relief ceramic tiles and murals which she has designed and fabricated at her studio on the Gowanus Canal.
You're starting a renovation project and it’s likely that your initial focus is contemplating exactly what you want your home to look like and how you want to occupy the space. Let’s face it, we all want comfort and beauty. However, if you are reading this then you’ve probably already also concluded that comfort and beauty are not your only goals – you care about having a home that is energy efficient, healthy to live in and does not use materials or function in a manner that negatively impacts on the natural environment, and this goal is directly affected by the technical way the space is designed, in particular the mechanical systems, and the choice of materials.
This is the point at which the need for an architect or other designer comes into play. Based on our experience, we’ve basically distilled project planning into two major areas, and the degree of help you need from an architect or designer in each of these categories will dictate the scope of the architect’s role and the consequent cost:
1. Designing for comfort and beauty, and the extent to which your personal style for your home is solidified or whether you want design advice
2. Technical systems design and whole-house systems integration
Why we haven’t used a full service architect for past projects, and why we are using one for this renovation:
Architects are artists and their first inclination is to take on an entire project. The standard operating procedure for architects is to include all measuring and design work with several possible design layouts, multiple room elevations, preparation of “contractor bidding documents”, collection of bids, project management, construction oversight, and dealing with the permit process. For this level of service architects most often charge a percentage of construction costs typically ranging from 10-15%.
You don’t have to go to architecture or design school, however, to have vision for interior design and layout. If you are like me -- a consummate planner and extremely detail oriented, someone who draws multiple scale-drawn floor plans, right down to the inch, to hone down the design to exactly what you want – then you likely also baulk at the notion of paying someone else for design when you’ve done the creative work. Consequently, my MO on all my renovation projects to date has been to do my own designing and to use an expediter with drafting capabilities to draw up and file the necessary plans with the Department of Buildings and the Landmark’s Preservation Commission. Any experienced builder should be able to work with a simple set of floor plans and a materials list without elevations for every wall, floor and ceiling. If you are doing a renovation with isolated and discrete, albeit high impact, pockets of change, like new kitchen and bathrooms, and you have an eye for layout and choosing fixtures and so forth, or you can have those layouts done by your fittings supplier (like kitchen showrooms that often offer a free measuring and layout service) then you may also be able to get by with this approach. Depending on the scope of the project (whether the Certificate of Occupancy is changing, for instance) the cost in my experience for an expediter to fully handle the project by drawing up the necessary plans and reports, filing them and ferrying them through the Department of Buildings and the Landmark’s Preservation Commission, has been between $5,000 and $13,000 . This approach saves a lot of money (I’ll get into that in my next blog posting) and eliminates duplication b/c it is likely that any architect you hire will also hire an expediter. But beware, it requires a lot of time, attention and effort on your part. We are all busy and not everyone has the time or the inclination to plan a project, draw up their own plans, come up with sketches and materials they want to use, work closely with an expediter and see it through. If you fall into this group then you will need a full service architect to handle the entire process.
I also enjoy researching the latest options for fittings, finishes and furniture (try saying that 10-times fast) because I want my projects to present my personal style, so I do not need an architect or designer to take me to showrooms and the like, often a function built in to percentage-based pricing.
Last, the arrangement simply needs to be fair. In a percentage-of-construction-costs fee structure the work is not broken down. In addition to ostensibly paying for design work that I am doing because design would have been included in the percentage fee, there are quite a few aspects of our overall project that are so discrete but pricey, and not requiring any architect input, that it is simply unfair to pay an architect a portion of the costs of those projects -- for example relining all my fireplaces, re-doing the brownstone in the front of the building, stripping the paint from the facade, repositioning my pre-existing iron garden terrace and staircase and other items related to the garden and landscaping.
So , what made this project different from my other projects that made me decide I needed a full service architect rather than just follow my usual bare bones expediter route? Simple: we’re way beyond redesigning interior living spaces. Even if you are like me and are inclined to do the design work yourself, you may feel, as I do on the 168 Clinton St. job, that the changes in the systems may be too extensive to handle on your own. We will be moving plumbing and redesigning heating and hot water systems, introducing some kind of A/C, installing state of the art whole- house high tech capability, redoing lighting, considering solar PV or wind and solar hot water, opening some walls that need structural evaluation, not to mention rethinking every aspect of the building envelope that can affect energy efficiency -- sounds like a lot but, no, this is NOT a gut renovation because nearly all walls and floors and detailing will remain in tact. Although a mechanical engineer, not an architect, will ultimately design and draw the heating/hot water/plumbing and A/C aspects, we want to take a holistic approach and ensure that all the systems are designed to complement each other and that the electrical system is designed to seamlessly mesh with them, so we decided that we needed an architect to pull it all together. The challenge is defining the scope – finding the dividing line between what I need an architect to do and what I don’t need, and how the fee structure will work, which will be the topic of my next blog so check back or subscribe to an RSS feed.
This is the point at which the need for an architect or other designer comes into play. Based on our experience, we’ve basically distilled project planning into two major areas, and the degree of help you need from an architect or designer in each of these categories will dictate the scope of the architect’s role and the consequent cost:
1. Designing for comfort and beauty, and the extent to which your personal style for your home is solidified or whether you want design advice
2. Technical systems design and whole-house systems integration
Why we haven’t used a full service architect for past projects, and why we are using one for this renovation:
Architects are artists and their first inclination is to take on an entire project. The standard operating procedure for architects is to include all measuring and design work with several possible design layouts, multiple room elevations, preparation of “contractor bidding documents”, collection of bids, project management, construction oversight, and dealing with the permit process. For this level of service architects most often charge a percentage of construction costs typically ranging from 10-15%.
You don’t have to go to architecture or design school, however, to have vision for interior design and layout. If you are like me -- a consummate planner and extremely detail oriented, someone who draws multiple scale-drawn floor plans, right down to the inch, to hone down the design to exactly what you want – then you likely also baulk at the notion of paying someone else for design when you’ve done the creative work. Consequently, my MO on all my renovation projects to date has been to do my own designing and to use an expediter with drafting capabilities to draw up and file the necessary plans with the Department of Buildings and the Landmark’s Preservation Commission. Any experienced builder should be able to work with a simple set of floor plans and a materials list without elevations for every wall, floor and ceiling. If you are doing a renovation with isolated and discrete, albeit high impact, pockets of change, like new kitchen and bathrooms, and you have an eye for layout and choosing fixtures and so forth, or you can have those layouts done by your fittings supplier (like kitchen showrooms that often offer a free measuring and layout service) then you may also be able to get by with this approach. Depending on the scope of the project (whether the Certificate of Occupancy is changing, for instance) the cost in my experience for an expediter to fully handle the project by drawing up the necessary plans and reports, filing them and ferrying them through the Department of Buildings and the Landmark’s Preservation Commission, has been between $5,000 and $13,000 . This approach saves a lot of money (I’ll get into that in my next blog posting) and eliminates duplication b/c it is likely that any architect you hire will also hire an expediter. But beware, it requires a lot of time, attention and effort on your part. We are all busy and not everyone has the time or the inclination to plan a project, draw up their own plans, come up with sketches and materials they want to use, work closely with an expediter and see it through. If you fall into this group then you will need a full service architect to handle the entire process.
I also enjoy researching the latest options for fittings, finishes and furniture (try saying that 10-times fast) because I want my projects to present my personal style, so I do not need an architect or designer to take me to showrooms and the like, often a function built in to percentage-based pricing.
Last, the arrangement simply needs to be fair. In a percentage-of-construction-costs fee structure the work is not broken down. In addition to ostensibly paying for design work that I am doing because design would have been included in the percentage fee, there are quite a few aspects of our overall project that are so discrete but pricey, and not requiring any architect input, that it is simply unfair to pay an architect a portion of the costs of those projects -- for example relining all my fireplaces, re-doing the brownstone in the front of the building, stripping the paint from the facade, repositioning my pre-existing iron garden terrace and staircase and other items related to the garden and landscaping.
So , what made this project different from my other projects that made me decide I needed a full service architect rather than just follow my usual bare bones expediter route? Simple: we’re way beyond redesigning interior living spaces. Even if you are like me and are inclined to do the design work yourself, you may feel, as I do on the 168 Clinton St. job, that the changes in the systems may be too extensive to handle on your own. We will be moving plumbing and redesigning heating and hot water systems, introducing some kind of A/C, installing state of the art whole- house high tech capability, redoing lighting, considering solar PV or wind and solar hot water, opening some walls that need structural evaluation, not to mention rethinking every aspect of the building envelope that can affect energy efficiency -- sounds like a lot but, no, this is NOT a gut renovation because nearly all walls and floors and detailing will remain in tact. Although a mechanical engineer, not an architect, will ultimately design and draw the heating/hot water/plumbing and A/C aspects, we want to take a holistic approach and ensure that all the systems are designed to complement each other and that the electrical system is designed to seamlessly mesh with them, so we decided that we needed an architect to pull it all together. The challenge is defining the scope – finding the dividing line between what I need an architect to do and what I don’t need, and how the fee structure will work, which will be the topic of my next blog so check back or subscribe to an RSS feed.
