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Send our website to a friend! Attention Residential & Garden Architects ... If you are "unhappy" with the state of our professions these days, go here to read what we have to suggest. To help the Hurricane Victims, in Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, and other Gulf Coast areas, Go to any of these 80 Relief Organizations Here is what YOU can do about the Genocide taking place in Darfur and Chad! Have a nice cuppa tea or coffee while you are enjoying our site  Sorry, but we are all out of crumpets! |
On the subject of Cost ... The popular belief that to engage an Architect to custom design and "oversee" the construction of a single family home by an independent General Contractor is such an expensive proposition that only the extremely wealthy can afford the "luxury", is a misconception which, since the early 1960s, has been carefully inculcated and nurtured by the "Production Housing Industry" (PHI) by means of, literally, millions of well aimed and crafted, corporate and institutional advertisements and PR campaigns at a cost of better than 50 Billion dollars! As counterintuitive as it may sound, however, nothing could be further from the truth! In fact, no matter where you live in the US and Canada, a home (of any size, large or small) custom designed by a local Architect and built by an independent General Contractor need not cost any more on a per square foot of living space basis (architectural fees included), than an off-the-shelf, stick-built, PHI built house of the exact same design, layout, looks, size, and construction quality! Why? Because, no matter where you live, PHI builders are subject to the same local hourly labor rates and the same cost of materials as local General Contractors are. Kitchen appliances, sinks, bathtubs, showers, and toilets cost just about the same everywhere for everybody. So do HVAC and hot water systems, electrical and plumbing supplies, roofing and wall materials, flooring, windows, doors, insulation, paint, and the whole gamut of thingamajigs that make up today's house. Where the Architectural fee undeniably adds another 10 -11% to the basic construction cost of a custom built home, the cost of that fee is easily offset by the 12%+ marketing & sales as well as other expenses incurred by the developer and passed on to the client. To wit; this country's largest developer places at least 100 full page ads at about $60,000 a pop in 50+ major metropolitan newspapers each year for a total of some $300,000,000. On top of that, it places another 100 full page ads per year in about 100 local & community papers each at a cost of $30,000 per page totaling another $300,000,000. Add to that ads on national and local TV channels and in countless magazines such as "Better Homes & Gardens", and it doesn't take a genius to figure out that they spend at –the very least– some $850,000,000 on advertising to generate their $±11 billion sales volume (or about 8%) per year. On top of that, it incurs another 2.5%+ of sales –or about $7,160 per each house sold– generated by the thousands of empty building lots it carries in its inventory at ±$100,000 each! Clearly, those are costs and expenses which the independent Architect–General Contractor team does not have and, thus, doesn't "pass on"! Hence, our flat-out statement that a home, custom designed by a local Architect and built by an independent General Contractor will, when all is said and done, prove to be no more "expensive" on a per sq. ft. of floor space basis than an off-the-shelf, stick-built, PHI house of the exact same design, lay-out, looks, square footage, and construction quality, IF one would indeed be available for you to buy! So much for the myth that only the extremely wealthy can afford themselves the "luxury" of custom architectural services. A corollary and, unfortunately, equally popular misconception we would like to address here is that "Architects only care to design big, multi-million dollar houses for the extremely wealthy"; i.e. that architects are elitist and not particularly interested in designing small to average sized homes for ordinary, middle income folks. Here again, nothing could be further from the truth! In fact, the vast majority (85+%) of all architects would be more than delighted to work with middle income clients who want a small to medium sized, well designed and built, yet affordable home of their own. You want proof? Spend a couple of hours calling a dozen, or so, randomly selected (from the yellow pages) residential architects, and you'll have it! On the subject of Design ... Rather than subjecting you to another dry, technical "discussion", this time on our views on the subject of design, we felt that a "playback" of a talk we had not too long ago with the owner of a medium sized (±3,200 sft), well laid out, and beautifully detailed and appointed (inside and out), custom designed (NOT by us, by the way) and built home in the Washington, DC, Metro area, might prove to be more enlightening and entertaining to you. Here is some of what the gentleman had to say on the subject ...
"If you just want a big and
imposing house that lets every passer-by know that you belong to the
"moneyed class" ...
"On the other hand, if you have been dreaming for years of
owning a wonderful
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