Sunamp

[daiking]

1 minute ago, ProDave said:

There was another one where they used stainless steel yacht rigging wire stretched across at seemingly random angles.  It clearly fell foul of the "will not pass a 100mm diameter sphere" and in a final sequence, a polycarbonate sheet had been added to make it pass, with the clear implication it would later be removed.

I recall something like that on the £100k house too.

[Ferdinand]

27 minutes ago, Barney12 said:

Are building control documents available through "public information requests"?

I guess not if they used a private firm.

I'm almost tempted to ask for a copy of the completion cert

 

I do not think they are public.

 

Hope I am wrong.

[Jml]

Our council does not have the plans, but does have approved date, last visit and completion date in relation to a given property.

[Ferdinand]

I have watched this in the background this PM.

 

1 - They did not seem to say much about ventilation.

2 - I thought it was built to the boundaries, yet at the end McCloud seemed to be sitting in the landscaping. I missed the detail of that.

3 - I think the interior decor was quite impressive.

 

Ferdinand

 

Edited October 26, 2017 by Ferdinand

[Ian]

7 hours ago, SteamyTea said:

And people often wonder why I think Architects and house designers are tossers.

 

I trained for 7 years to be able to use the job title 'architect'. It is a job title that is protected by law and we are all required to have PI Insurance.

 

I'm sorry you think all of us are tossers - personally I've always tried to be helpful on this forum where I feel my input might be useful.

 

'house designer' - that's not a job title that's protected by law and could be anyone - no training or experience required. 

[jack]

20 minutes ago, Ian said:

I'm sorry you think all of us are tossers - personally I've always tried to be helpful on this forum where I feel my input might be useful. 

 

Many of us appreciate your input Ian, and most of us don't think all - or even most - architects are tossers.

 

There are unfortunately a number of people who seem to take pleasure in denigrating architects at every opportunity. I genuinely don't know where the animosity comes from, but there seems to be some sort of pride in putting down architects or proving that there's something about building that they don't have deep expert knowledge about. Perhaps these critics are great at all aspects of designing buildings themselves, or don't care about design or function enough to care, or have had a bad experience. I don't know, but it's no excuse for rudeness.

 

All the architects I've met have appeared to be very hard working people who almost certainly didn't get paid anything like as much as most other people who've spent a similar amount of time in education and training.

 

Of the roughly 10 architects we met before we built our house, one was a tosser. He was actually probably pretty good at his job, but I found him arrogant and would have found it difficult to work with him. Every other person we met seemed excellent, and we were utterly torn as to which one to choose. 1 in 10 being a tosser seems to be about right for people in general.

 

In the end, we made a mistake. We went with one architect, only to find at our next meeting that the architect we interviewed was now going to be the "second" on the project due to where he was based. We met the new person, and she seemed okay. As it turned out, she was fine to work with (ie, not a tosser), but we didn't like what she designed after several attempts and versions. In the end, we agreed to pay them for what they'd done and parted company amicably.

 

The guy we ended up getting to do the work was great. The house isn't perfect, but I believe most of the imperfections or shortcomings relate to things that we pushed ourselves.

[Jeremy Harris]

@Ian, I second @jack's comments, but would add that I think there is a problem that is specific to self-builders, in that it can be pretty tough for self-builders to find an architect they can work with.  @jack has explained his difficulties.  Our experience was a bit different, in that I hawked our outline requirements around four local architectural practices and had four very unhelpful responses, to the extent that we both felt very demoralised about the whole idea of self-build, and wondered if we'd be better off forgetting about it, and buying a renovation project.  Admittedly, we were experiencing a long delay in buying our plot at the time, and that added to our general feeling of disillusion.

 

As said before here, I ended up designing our house myself, not because I wanted to, but really because I had no choice.  We did talk to an architectural technician, and we would have been very happy to work with him, but he was planning to retire, and was reluctant to take on our project.  I found the process of doing a crash course in learning about house design in a year bloody tough, and a great deal of hard work.  I have always felt that our house would have been better with an architect's input, and since we've built it I've met a local architect who I would have been very happy to work with, and who I've recommended to a few people.

 

I think a lot of the hassle self-builders often seem to have with architects may come down to self-builders often having very strong views about what they want, and some architects also having strong views as to what they think their clients should want.  This seems to be a theme that not only crops up here from time to time, but also on TV programmes.  The most memorable example I can recall is the Grand Designs episode where the clients (Welsh soap opera actors, IIRC) and their architect fell out to the point where they only communicated by letter, but there have been several instances in these shows where there has been a lot of conflict between clients and architects.

 

I'm not at all sure why this should be, and would be interested in understanding why this happens so often.

[jamiehamy]

All I would say is remember this is TV. It doesn't reflect real life in the way you or I experience it. Probably still doesn't have BC approval or the stairs were ripped out before it did or there is an ugly handrail bolted in place. The programme is there to satisfy the masses and GD is just a glorified soap preying on people's misery and money and efforts. I've only watched a few episodes and it's pure dross. Doesn't help a self builder like me in the slightest. It's a glorified design show. Not a house build show.

 

Ooft, got that off my chest! 

 

 

[jack]

I personally suspect that for at least some people, architect bashing falls into the general basket of undervaluing industries where the product doesn't always reflect, to the untrained eye, the amount of knowledge, experience, and indeed graft that's involved in generating it.

 

A friend is a graphic designer and is regularly turned down for design jobs because she's "far too expensive". She's highly experienced, does brilliant work, and is flexible and easy to work with. She makes an average of maybe £20 an hour! I wonder what people think is a reasonable price to pay?

[Ian]

@jack

@JSHarris

 

I’m a partner in a medium sized architects practice. We mainly work on large scale commercial projects for national clients and don’t do any work for self builders. The reason for that decision is that its very difficult to make a profit on that type of project whilst also giving a proper professional service whilst having normal office overheads and PI Insurance costs.

 

Self building your own house is naturally a very personal business where every decision is extremely important and analysed much more so than on commercial work. The only self build houses I’ve worked on have been for myself or (working for free) for family and close friends. We also occasionally get asked to design houses for our individual wealthier commercial clients - we can’t make a decent profit on those either even though the builds sometimes cost in the millions on occasion. As an architect my largest self build house for one of our commercial client was £5M+ but we still didn’t make a proper profit.

 

I think most architects who design one-off houses work as sole practitioners or in practices with less than 5 staff. They typically have lower overheads and PI Insurance costs. They also earn less money but maybe they get better job satisfaction from the rare self-build clients who don’t think they are tossers :-)

 

 

 

[ToughButterCup]

18 minutes ago, Ian said:

[...]

but maybe they get better job satisfaction from the rare self-build clients who don’t think they are tossers :-)

 

I appreciate the wry humour. You do not need to defend your discipline here. The odd tasteless comment is exactly that, and should be ignored. 

[PeterW]

46 minutes ago, Ian said:

 

I think most architects who design one-off houses work as sole practitioners or in practices with less than 5 staff. They typically have lower overheads and PI Insurance costs.

 

I have a very good friend Alan who is the principle in a reasonably sized practice and he once did some pro bono work for me and a charity.

 

We could pass their benefit in kind into the cost model for gaining funding and one of my colleagues on the committee expressed a stunned look of disbelief when they learnt that we had clocked up £28,000 worth of time and services ... they were close on to suggesting my friend was swinging the lead a little, and even said “but they only produced a few pictures.....!”

 

I happen to know that the £28k was the cost of the time, not including any profits and included additional third parties such as engineers and surveyors, all of which donated their time for free. The result was a stunning building but I still have a wry smile when the colleague said he had his extension plans drawn for £250 and the new building wasn’t 100 times bigger ....! 

 

When we were looking at plots I did ask about whether Alan was interested and he said “you couldn’t afford us.....!” He wasn’t being arrogant, he was being truthful ..! The adage of you get what you pay for is true, and echoing what @jack has said, yes you do get the odd tosser but that goes for clients too ..... 

[ProDave]

1 hour ago, Ian said:

 

I trained for 7 years to be able to use the job title 'architect'. It is a job title that is protected by law and we are all required to have PI Insurance.

 

I'm sorry you think all of us are tossers - personally I've always tried to be helpful on this forum where I feel my input might be useful.

 

'house designer' - that's not a job title that's protected by law and could be anyone - no training or experience required. 

I don't think architects are "tossers"  I did however have an issue with the business model that some architects use.

 

My example is our previous house. I had designed the house. What I wanted was someone to take the design, suggest perhaps some improvements, then detail the design and produce a set of drawings for planning, building control and ultimately for the builders to work from to build it. I did not want the architect to project manage it or put the build out to tender.

 

What I got was 2 of the architects didn't bother to turn up to the site meeting, and the 2 that did, seemed to ignore the scope of the work package that I wanted, and instead quoted quite ridiculous fees that seem to be based on a percentage of the build cost, and not related to the man hours of work they would need to put into the project. To add insult to injury, their estimate of the build cost was not far off double what it actually cost me to build in the end (and therefore their fee was nearly double), and if it really had cost what they said it would, then the project would not have been viable and I certainly would not have afforded to build it.

 

It was a very disappointing exercise.

 

For that build, in the end I employed a local firm of builders to build the shell, and they charged £2500 for the planning and building regs drawings. There was no "architect" input at all.

 

With my present build I just could not face that again, so this time it was all detailed and drawn by an architectural technician, with input from  a structural engineer.

[ProDave]

Back to the original topic.

 

I have just watched it now.  What a complete shambles with the first basement contractor.

 

I wonder how it works when you have a tiny site and you are building on the entire site. Do you rent the adjoining space from the respective owners to work from?

 

How does connecting services to a house like that work, again never any details.

 

If I read it right, he added an extra 100mm of external insulation that was never planned. If he was right up to the boundary to start with, the building is now trespassing on adjoining land by 100mm all round.

 

I did see the sun amp, but no mention other than high tech energy saving heating system.  There were lots of rolls of white ducting so assume some form of mvhr?

 

Agreed non compliant stairs.

 

The brief preview of next weeks episode appeared to show another staircase with no banisters.

[Jeremy Harris]

I can easily believe that the vast majority of architects simply couldn't make a profit from self-builds.  Accepting that I had no architectural knowledge or experience at all, but did have the slight advantage of around 25 years experience of using CAD, and was familiar with producing technical drawings, I would guess that I put well over 1000 hours into the design of our house, and went through several iterations, over the course of a design process that took around a year.  On top of that, I must have put a similar amount of time into reading up on architecture and design, reading and gaining an understanding of building regulations, as they applied to design and layout, and reading up on all the conditions imposed by being adjacent to a listed building and inside an AONB.

 

For an architect to have done a half-decent job of the design alone, ignoring any additional services, such as looking after the planning application, doing the building regs application or overseeing and providing a management service for the build itself, would have meant that they would have been working for a pretty low hourly rate, I'm sure.

Edited October 26, 2017 by JSHarris

[Nickfromwales]

12 hours ago, Ian said:

 

I trained for 7 years to be able to use the job title 'architect'. It is a job title that is protected by law and we are all required to have PI Insurance.

 

I'm sorry you think all of us are tossers - personally I've always tried to be helpful on this forum where I feel my input might be useful.

 

'house designer' - that's not a job title that's protected by law and could be anyone - no training or experience required. 

I may have to clear up why I liked the comment from @SteamyTea, which was done whilst quickly scanning the thread. Post with haste, and let your arse simmer in a hot pan over the next few hours . My bad. 

 

The differing replies Steamy got was what I was reacting to, and indeed for such mixed replies they would certainly have awarded themselves the tilte of "tosser". 

The closing statement in that post was what I failed to read and digest properly, so @Ian, I apologise unreservedly for that if it has caused you any offence, as none was meant whatsoever.

 

@SteamyTea, Nick, can you please edit that comment to reflect the individuals who were at fault in this particular instance please, as it's clearly the production crew of the TV programme rather than any suggested profession. I think such generalisation may not represent us here very well  . Thanks in advance. 

[Gone West]

Perhaps for the best of both worlds a self builder could design the house that they want themselves and then ask an architect to look at it and suggest improvements. We did this and incorporated some of his suggestions.

[daiking]

I can’t see how Steamy has done anything wrong given the context of his post. 

 

 

[Barney12]

6 minutes ago, PeterStarck said:

Perhaps for the best of both worlds a self builder could design the house that they want themselves and then ask an architect to look at it and suggest improvements. We did this and incorporated some of his suggestions.

 

This is very much how we worked. Because we’re on the National Park we didn’t have any choice other than to use an architect as the park frown at ‘DIY’. They also have the architects they ‘like’ which significantly improves your planning process. Of course both of those points are entirely wrong and frustrating but that’s the way it is. 

 

We we agreed an hourly rate with our architect and worked collaboratively on the design (which the park changed significantly from our original ideas ). A lot of that work was done in the ‘pre-planning’ process (don’t get me started on that money making scheme!).

Once we got planning permission that was his involvement over. Of all the prebuild bills; ecology, surveys, engineers reports etc the architect was by far the cheapest in hourly rate terms. 

[Jeremy Harris]

41 minutes ago, PeterStarck said:

Perhaps for the best of both worlds a self builder could design the house that they want themselves and then ask an architect to look at it and suggest improvements. We did this and incorporated some of his suggestions.

 

With hindsight, that would have been the perfect approach for us, too.  I found that the layout and overall dimensions were pretty tightly constrained by the plot and the conditions imposed, mainly by the Environment Agency and the AONB design "guidance".

 

What I struggled with a great deal was how to turn a featureless box that had all the right room sizes and locations into something that looked half decent.  I don't have an artistic cell in my body, so I ended up looking at lots and lots of house photos on the internet, and then going through an iterative process with several scale models until we had something we both agreed looked OK.  The hardest part for me was getting the detail and proportions of the external elements half-way right and this is something that I'm sure an architect would have been able to help with a great deal.

[Ferdinand]

Interesting views.

 

14 hours ago, Ian said:

Self building your own house is naturally a very personal business where every decision is extremely important and analysed much more so than on commercial work. The only self build houses I’ve worked on have been for myself or (working for free) for family and close friends. We also occasionally get asked to design houses for our individual wealthier commercial clients - we can’t make a decent profit on those either even though the builds sometimes cost in the millions on occasion. As an architect my largest self build house for one of our commercial client was £5M+ but we still didn’t make a proper profit.

 

I think most architects who design one-off houses work as sole practitioners or in practices with less than 5 staff. They typically have lower overheads and PI Insurance costs. They also earn less money but maybe they get better job satisfaction from the rare self-build clients who don’t think they are tossers :-)

 

Largely agree. I think self-builders as a group struggle to deal with architects for a couple of reasons:

 

1 - Architects have a huge hinterland / experience, but are hugely *varied* but have an individual design language/style within that which is personal and often quite circumscribed. eg if I examine a Lutyens house or a Michael Hopkins house or a <name current architect> house, I know roughly what I am getting if I do not brief them otherwise. But most self-builders only build one house, and while they are struggling with the Planning and Plot swamps it is difficult to focus on finding the right architect that matches their own taste. Quite often, we do not know what is even possible.

 

2 - I think of the partnership as two people on a seesaw, and the self-builder needs to grow a hinteland and learn architecture-ese very quickly, to keep it in balance. That is not that the architect will seek to dominate, but just that there is an imbalance of experience and therefore power.

 

3 - There is then the money thing, and us not wanting to spend it.

 

Personally, I would use artictects as another specialised consultant rather than a designer plus project manager. If I want a project manager I will hire a specialist project manager, and I am unlikely to have projects with big enough budgets to afford a full-service firm.

 

There are some architects in larger-than-small practises and who specialise in individual clients. One prominent at the moment is George Clarke & Partners. Interestingly they only take on projects over £200k (= minimum fee = 20k-ish ?) and place a heavy emphasis on removing risk from the client. Though iirc they have a getout clause.

 

Quote

 

We take on projects from £200,000 to £2,000,000 and take pride in the transparent, organised and professional service we offer. Our initial consultation is free of charge and our design fees are time-based and agreed in advance.

 

Another interesting one is Allan Corfield ,who has modestly more staff than 5 and a growing practice, who declares stage payments based on the project cost up front in £££.

 

http://www.houseplanninghelp.com/hph168-an-example-of-how-much-it-costs-to-hire-an-architect-with-allan-corfield/

 

There are also ones who deal with rather richer people.

 

The king thing to me is those who educate the customer about the process, and are good at encouraging the customer to understand design / use of the building.

 

Ferdinand

 

Edited October 27, 2017 by Ferdinand

[Ian]

Admins - Just for the record there's no need to alter or amend anything on this thread on my account. It's a very useful exchange of views (warts and all).

 

Unless you are a self builder who is loaded with money (so unlikely to be reading this forum) I think the process of engagement with an architect outlined by @Ferdinand and @Barney12 sounds like a good approach. For those with a limited budget that sounds like a really sensible way of working. The other thing I'd say is that its critically important that you let your designer know what your budget is for the build and also your intentions regarding the build process - ie are you doing all the work yourself or are you getting a main contractor to build it - budget is (or should!) be one of the major design constraints that are considered.

Edited October 27, 2017 by Ian

[Ian]

2 hours ago, JSHarris said:

 

With hindsight, that would have been the perfect approach for us, too.  I found that the layout and overall dimensions were pretty tightly constrained by the plot and the conditions imposed, mainly by the Environment Agency and the AONB design "guidance".

 

What I struggled with a great deal was how to turn a featureless box that had all the right room sizes and locations into something that looked half decent.  I don't have an artistic cell in my body, so I ended up looking at lots and lots of house photos on the internet, and then going through an iterative process with several scale models until we had something we both agreed looked OK.  The hardest part for me was getting the detail and proportions of the external elements half-way right and this is something that I'm sure an architect would have been able to help with a great deal.

 Jeremy - back on the old forum I read your whole blog as you were building - I thought you did a brilliant job and the house looks wonderful as well as having outstanding technical performance characteristics. It was a really great write up.

[ToughButterCup]

@PeterStarck's approach (outlined above) , one that empahsises partnership is difficult.

 

All professional relationships are subject to the same dynamic. How can we -domestic clients- know whether a professional's decisions are really in our best interests? Professional Associations  - ones that are meant to 'police' their sector - are often loath to draw attention to anything but the poorest practice.

 

So, @PeterStarck's model is for me the only one that stands a chance of working well.  It's tricky, though. Tricky because the quality of the professional relationship will only show its true colours when something goes wrong. 

 

And, by chance, that's what makes good TV

[Ian]

@recoveringacademic

I'm travelling to Blackpool about once a week with work at the moment to a job that's on site in the town centre - so not too far from you.

 

If you ever feel it would be useful to talk to someone on site about any aspect of your build let me know and I'll pop over. (free btw! - did I say I'm not looking for any self-build work?!)