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William R. Hoppé & Associates |
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If you want to place an Advertisement on our Website, click HERE! Join us as an AGHA Member Firm and you'll enjoy a personalized website that (except for some of your own favorite pictures) will look exactly like this one! To qualify, your firm must have both a Residential and a Landscape Architect on its staff each with a minimum of 10 years of residential experience. Imagine YOUR name at the top of this page! Click HERE for more information. Our Weekly One-Liner What do you call it when worms take over the world? Global Worming. 
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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 100 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, 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 pretty much 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 -12% 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 PHI builder and passed on to the client. To wit; this country's largest PHI builder places at least 100 full page ads at about $70,000 a pop in 50+ major metropolitan newspapers each year for a total of some $350,000,000. 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 $900,000,000 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 $7,200 per each house sold– generated by the thousands of empty building lots it carries in its inventory at ±$100,000 each! Clearly, those are all costs and expenses which an independent, general contractor does not have to "pass on" to his client (you)! 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 subjects of Design and Quality ... 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
"On the other hand, if you have been dreaming for years of owning
a wonderful
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