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| Finding Architects |
If you have a vision of your new home, it will probably take an architect to bring it into being. But how do you find one. And more importantly, how do you find the right one? The alternatives or options to employing an architect are limited, even if they are the most commonly pursued. They include: take what you are given, in a standard estate of repetitive houses, and live with the shortcomings of buying an average product in one of the most personal decisions of your life.
You could buy second-hand, learn from someone else’s mistakes and live in their misshapen shoes. You can buy off the plans, but then find that the house you have chosen was designed for a site where the sun comes in from opposite windows to the view and where the double garage is set in the midst of an ancient fairy fort.
You could draw your own but who wants to live in a two-dimensional, two storey house with a door in the centre, windows balanced on either side, a path up the middle, smoke coming out of the chimney in perpetuity and V-shaped birds wheeling overhead?
Crayon drawings don’t usually get through the planning process and our multifaceted lives have more dimensions. “Architects take their brief in consultation with a client. A good architect will tease out a clients needs and see how a house must perform for them, how they live, eat, sleep and who is to live in a house and be accommodated there, how it must be designed for them over the years ahead”, says Paul Hudson, a busy architect and stylist of some repute.
Alternative Vision
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He rails against the ‘one size fits all’ approach by this country’s inherently conservative developers, while admitting that more enlightened developers are slowly coming to grips with the fact that the Irish home buying public have become increasingly discriminating. Most people have lived abroad or at least have seen alternatives to three bed-roomed semi’s on TV design programmes, have lived in a variety of houses or apartments and don’t all want to live standardised lives.
The percentage of architect designed homes in Ireland is low, in single percentage figures, and probably in the low single percentile categories at that, he admits. This may be one of the reasons for the generally low quality of the built residential environment in this country of only a few million souls.
The term ‘architect designed’ as it applies to Irish homes is much more than a line on an auctioneers sales brochure, advertising a plush pad or flat-roofed folly for re-sale. It might mean that a particular house has a hint of the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, 90’s or 00’s or simply reflects the era in which it was designed or built.
What it should mean that a measure of intelligence, specialist knowledge, an aesthetic sensibility and creativity has been applied to a project, variously involving bricks, mortar, wood, steel and a share of dreams. Architecture is where art aims to hold hands with science. The result, at a minimum, keeps the rain out and lets the light in, but aspires to be something much greater
An artist may draw an idealised house, an engineer can make a building stand in the face of gales and earthquakes, but an architect should be able to follow a middle route of designing houses to satisfy and gratify, individual human requirements.
As you pick your own architect, each individual will tend towards one end or the other of the art/engineering spectrum, but none should lose sight of either, or forget the thousands of pages of technical regulation and codes. Seasoned builders, surveyors, draughts people engineers, other construction professions and planners doing a nixer can all meet basic house design criteria. However, only a talented architect can give you an individual, highly functional. Aesthetically appealing home to live in, argues Paul Hudson.
A good architect working on your behalf, should listen to your brief, interpret it and be able to give you the house, extension or alteration ideally suited to your own needs and the site presented to them. Admittedly, architects services aren’t cheap and some of their more fanciful notions can drive a coach and horses through your coach-house conversion budget.
However, architects can save you money in the short, medium or long term, argues Hudson. Savings can be as a result of an architects specialist knowledge of products, their specification of materials, maximisation of the site aspect, topography, energy efficiency, and site visits to ensure that builders follow plans and a host of other professional attributes.
“An architect won’t necessarily make your house any cheaper but he or she will ensure that you get optimum value for money” he points out. And, says Paul, an architect will make an input from the very outset, from assessing a site to designing a house to best suit it, and you, through to delivery.
Rules of thumb
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Sounds wholesome, but it is of course a business transaction, and architects do it for money. It is their business, after all. The rule of thumb traditionally associated with members of the Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland (RIAI) is that a house built will cost you 10% of a build budget, but this is a variable feast/famine. Count on paying between 9% and 13% of a build budget, advises Hudson, and the range can be accounted for by the sheer fact that even a small house design can be as time consuming as a large one.
The RIAI advises that the fee usually be on a percentage basis but that charges per hour can be agreed, which may suit either party if special conditions apply. Some architects may negotiate based on the number of site visits and agree a set figure for design alone. In general though they favour a full service from initial consultation to completion, when they certify ‘Opinion on compliance’ an important legal document required for future sale.
Architects may be able to save you money in the short term and long term through intelligent design, through a familiarity with local and national planning issues and through innovative approaches to design and energy efficiency After all, you can acquire ready-made house plans for a few hundred euros, either based on the many plans or catalogues in book shops or from engineers or trained draughtsmen or women. Then have an engineer or surveyor supervise ongoing construction as it goes on for an agreed sum. That’s the budget option.
Payment of an architects full service payment is usually staggered through the life of the building project, so that a certain sum is due at the design/application for planning stage, more on going to tender, more on building completion and certification etc.
Paying 10% on a 50,000 extension may seem a bit of a luxury, but, if the design delivers in every respect, it’s a small enough price to pay. People pay 5,000 for cookers, for three-piece suites, cobble lock drives even wide screen tv’s, and all of these necessities. Your house may be the only one to appreciate in value post-payment.
The search is on
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How do you find an architect. Apart from hanging out in trendy urban bars, the easiest way is to ask around. Check out our list here on this web site and e-mail them for services quotes. Let your fingers do the walking, try the Golden Pages. Try the RIAI on its web site www.riai.ie either. Check out their architect search section; it lists 20 questions to pose yourself before approaching an architect and also lists architects on a geographical basis. On this site the architects listed specialise in one off house design. Don’t be shy of knocking on doors, most people love to talk about their homes if they find someone has a genuine interest in it.
Get recommendations from other people who have used an architect or who are in the building, design or interior design business. Read the professional literature, newspapers, property supplements and the host of interiors and architecture magazines that all increasingly report of design and have a strong Irish content.
Have a look at some of the houses designed by today’s Irish architects on their web sites. Again, we have a list of architects web sites here at Irish Property Market, check the menu listing. When you approach an architect, have a brief prepared for them, with images, if possible, and a list of likes and dislikes. A good professional should be able to work up from your scraps to a working sketch. If you have trouble visualising a house from a sketch, ask for a model to be fashioned for you.
Above all else, choose a good architect, someone you feel is listening to you and delivering the results you desire with the benefit of all their skills. Remember that while architects like to reflect trends of the day, good design, while not timeless, should equally not date too rapidly. Their art should also conceal their art.
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