Practice area / Residential
Houses, drawn once and built right.
The residential practice runs about half the studio’s annual slate. New builds, additions over 800 square feet, and adaptive reuse of existing structures. We don’t take cosmetic remodels or kitchen-only projects — those need a different kind of designer than we are.
What we do
Schematic design through certificate of occupancy.
Site walks weekly through framing. Punch lists kept short by catching issues at the framing stage, not closeout. Submittals come back from the studio inside three business days, every time.
Sketches on trace, at the table.
Saturday morning kickoff at the studio. Three two-hour sessions over six weeks. Program locked in writing at week 3 before any modeling starts.
60 – 80 hours, hourly
Drawings, signed and issued.
Design development, construction documents, permit submission, GC bid set. We hand the framer a drawing set the kitchen island can also hold a copy of.
Fixed fee · 8 – 12% of cost
Weekly site walks through CofO.
The architect on the file walks the site every Wednesday afternoon from foundation to certificate of occupancy. Submittal turnaround capped at three business days.
Hourly · monthly invoice
A typical interior
White walls, oak floors, daylight that does the work.
Most of our residential interiors land here: a restrained palette, a window placed where the room needed it, and material details that wear in instead of out. The drawings make these moves invisible. That’s the whole point.
A typical project
Hill Section House — 14 months, 47 sheets.
A young family bought a 1940s structure on a hillside lot two years ago. They wanted four bedrooms, a daylit lower studio for the parent who works from home, and a garden that connects to the kitchen. We started with a Saturday morning at the kitchen table and a roll of trace paper. Fourteen months later they moved in.
- Footprint2,400 sf, four bedrooms, plus 380 sf lower studio
- Drawing set47 sheets issued for construction
- Site walksWeekly Wednesdays, foundation through CofO
- Closeout2 weeks ahead of schedule, 1.7% over GMP
- Submittal turnaroundInside 3 business days on every one
Fee structure
Monthly invoices. Time logs. No surprises.
Hourly through schematic design (usually 60 to 80 hours). Fixed fee for design development and construction documents (8 to 12 percent of construction cost on most projects). Hourly through construction administration. We send invoices monthly with a time log attached. The owner sees every hour the studio billed and what it was spent on.
When to call
Before you’ve bought the lot, ideally.
We’ve done feasibility studies for buyers who later walked from a property because the topography wouldn’t carry the program. That’s the kind of call we want to take. Mara Linwood, partner on residential
Send us the parcel address and a short note about what you’re trying to build. Feasibility studies turn around inside three weeks and the cost gets credited against the SD fee if you move forward.