Four houses, and exactly what design costs.
Fees are published because a design fee you have to ring for is usually a percentage of something.
Four houses, four budgets
Budgets given as ranges because clients are entitled to their privacy.
Victorian terrace, whole house — Paddington
Fourteen months, stripped to brick, rebuilt around how a family with two small children actually moves through a house.
Two-bedroom flat — Rosalie
Sixty square metres made to feel considerably larger with joinery, lighting and one wall removed.
Cottage kitchen extension — Ashgrove
A single-storey extension and a kitchen that finally faces the garden. Six months, one very patient client.
New build, interiors only — New Farm
Design-only scheme for a developer shell. Delivered as drawings and a shopping list the owners executed themselves.
Three ways to engage us
All fees exclude GST. Trade discounts on everything specified are passed to you at cost and evidenced on the invoice.
One room, one day
A full day at your house solving a single room, followed by a written scheme and shopping list within a week.
Design only
Full scheme, layouts, drawings and specification for you or your builder to execute. Priced by room count and complexity.
Design and management
Everything above plus running the project: trades, procurement, site visits and snagging through to handover.
Three things clients tell us they wish they had understood
Usually about six weeks in.
The budget conversation has to be real
A brief without a number is not a brief. We would far rather hear an uncomfortable figure at the first meeting and design to it than present something beautiful you have to say no to. Nobody has ever offended us with a small budget; plenty of projects have been damaged by a vague one.
Lighting is where the money goes furthest
If a room feels wrong and you cannot say why, it is nearly always the lighting. It is also the cheapest thing on the list to get right and the most expensive to retrofit after the plastering is done.
Site decisions cannot all wait
A renovation generates decisions daily, and delays compound. This is the entire argument for management: not that you could not make the decisions, but that somebody has to be reachable within the hour.
Asked at first meetings
Because you see the supplier invoice. Every purchase is passed through at cost with the documentation attached, and the retail price is shown alongside so you can see the difference. It is the simplest possible way to prove it and there is no reason not to.
Often, yes, and the two are not alternatives. A good builder builds what they are given accurately; deciding what they should be given is a different job. Design-only works well in that situation and is what we would suggest.
One room, one day. It exists precisely so people can use us without committing to a renovation, and a good number of those clients never come back because the problem is solved.
Ten per cent on a new build, twenty on anything older, and more if the house predates the war. Something is always different once the floor comes up. A project with no contingency is not a cheaper project, it is a project that will stop.
Yes, and we would encourage it. Rooms built entirely from new purchases tend to look like showrooms. Bring us the things you are not willing to part with at the first meeting and we will design around them.
One room, one day. Then decide about the rest of the house.
It is the least committing way to find out whether we are useful to you.