Ten months determining the leading residential architecture firms in every state has driven home what all 400 of them share: a commitment to building relationships with clients. Here’s a snapshot of how.
For all its human complication, the house that you and yours envision, the home that has been an idea-board fixation for all too long, is achievable. Still, its realization hinges on an event demanding preparation and communication: the client-architect interview.
And now, as we at Forbes publish our first-ever listing of America’s Best-in-State Residential Architects, it feels only right to explore that first-ever meeting between you and your architect—and help you set your partnership on a proper footing.
The first meeting with any architect is, above all else, an opportunity to test interpersonal dynamics. A chemistry between parties must emerge. Once you’ve presented your general project overview and delved into specific must-haves, be observant of whether the architect, in their body language and verbal responses, is clearing the way for you to be active in the proceedings and leaving space to articulate your viewpoints.
Indeed, today’s residential architects are acutely aware of the lingering perception that they tend to be headstrong non-listeners. And while good architects know that the final word on their skills is to be found in the finished dwelling, they also know that a disproportionate part of their job is as a listener—and that different clients require different approaches to the act of listening. As El Paso, Texas, architect and Forbes Best-in-State honoree Martina Lorey says, “Residential architecture is so very different from commercial work; clairvoyance is requisite.”
“At the same time,” adds Schicketanz, speaking of her interactions with the client, “we look at the land or the urban space together to see what shape will best integrate into its surroundings; we exercise “seeing” together.” ABOVE: Mal Paso House’s integrated dining-kitchen area.
Joe Fletcher Photography
Sharing Your Vision…
A good architect is by nature a solver of problems. They want complicated parameters. Such constraints are not only expected but considered a desirable tension, and an integral part of the creative process.
Still, it is incumbent upon the client to approach the task of gathering “ideas and inspiration” judiciously. In this era of social imagery, there exists the tendency for clients to over-accumulate pictures of sources, not only situating themselves in the aesthetic weeds but, in turn, losing sight of the actual mission: the creation of an architecture that’s greater than an amalgamation of image “likes,” an architecture that’s been ideated and crafted to be unique to you and your circumstances.
Thus, in these preliminary stages of the process, your architect doesn’t seek an entirely preconceived image of a design. To bring them a fully fleshed-out vision of the house you desire, down to the last details, is to introduce a hurdle to the origination of a novel design response. Instead, allow your desires and needs to be filtered through the architect’s own depths of total experience.
Granted, sources remain of vital importance to the process of realizing a design, and it’s inevitable that, as the client, you’ll have your selection; but be sure you’ve chosen wisely.
“We have historically suggested that clients rip things out of magazines,” says Forbes listed architect Keith Moskow, of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Moskow Linn Architects, “whether it’s an advertisement for an automobile or liquor, or a picture of ceramics, or a high-rise, or an interior, or a house…but it doesn’t have to be a house. We actually prefer that it not be a house.”
Most of what can be found on social platforms is lacking in context—the very ground from which any good architecture grows. Far better to look for examples of physical-world sources locally, where you intend to build. What’s proven to work well in practice in that local climate zone (search results provide enough clarification for one to swiftly make that determination) is what’s needed. Have a camera or smart phone on hand when you see it, for note taking. And if a significant design feature speaks to you—such as an entrance court, or a façade treatment, or even how the house’s overall massing has been handled—use that phone to identify which of the cardinal directions it faces and then try to photograph it with the effects of sunlight and shade present, so its behavior in the elements can be captured and better understood.
ABOVE: The kitchen in a Lopez Island, Washington, residence by Best-in-State honoree Ets Architecture. “As a small practice in a rural place, we believe architecture should belong to its setting,” says firm principal Nitsan Yomtov. “Too often, design ideas are imported from the city, overlooking what makes this community unique. Our clients are here because they want something else: a connection to the archipelago, a way of living that sustains what is local and fosters a sense of belonging.”
Taj Howe
ABOVE: The library of a recent house in Ojai, California, by Santa Monica firm Frederick Fisher and Partners, a Forbes Best-in-State recipient. “AI is being integrated into our practice,” Fisher says, “in two tracks, led by both design partners in design and in text by programming/planning and marketing. We are not using it to develop initial concepts, but to test and express them internally and with clients to accelerate the design process.”
Tim Street-Porter
ABOVE: The kitchen in Frederick Fisher and Partners’s Ojai residence. “Hybrid meeting has an impact on relationship building and communication,” says Fisher. “We all learned to work virtually during COVID. We adapted. Post-COVID, our team has generally settled into three days in-person and two remote. Clients are also more prone to virtual meetings. We still strongly prefer in-person meetings, but the reality is now quite different.”
Tim Street-Porter
Strong sources, in truth, have a way of exciting architects into action. And while attending local open-house tours can be the very best way to identify and collect, be reminded of the value of architecture books and magazines and aware of the treasure trove of historically important examples, typically with detailed supporting content, that now exist online. You’ll find them at the websites of such organizations and institutions as JSTOR, Columbia University’s Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library and the Getty Research Institute’s Getty Library Catalog. And if the architect’s own work has been published and has been a driver for you, therein lies the most direct path to mutual understanding.
“What started for me, in 2000, as portfolio photos and in-person interviews, had morphed by 2010 to the iPad or other digital presentation means,” says Maryland architect and Forbes Best-in-State honoree David Jameson, “and 99% in-person meetings. Today, less than 50% of initial client interactions are face to face, which has its pros and cons.” ABOVE: The pool elevation of Wildcat Mountain residence, The Plains, Virginia, by Jameson.
Paul Warchol
In the end, the aim of this effort is not to explicitly dictate an outcome, but to contribute to bringing to life a house that, due to the strategic participation of all parties, is decidedly headed in the right direction.
An Architect By Any Other Name…
Today, no matter where you live in the U.S., the potential client seeking a designer for a custom single-family house has no shortage of talent resources at their disposal. For your residential design business, competing directly with the architect is the unlicensed “architectural designer” (who, as talented as they might be, are not held to the same professional practice standards as architects). Next, there is the architectural designer who subcontracts out the filing of plans to license holders. There is also the design-build organization, which typically includes one or more licensed contractors and at least one licensed architect (which of the parties leads the job, the designer or the builder, is a question to have answered) and is otherwise staffed to carry responsibility for executing most, if not all, of a project’s realization requirements. There is the conventional builder-developer, an entity that may do one-off custom houses but whose common specialization is mass production for subdivisions. Finally, there is the peculiar hybrid entity: the “architectural designer-builder-real-estate-professional.”
“Twenty-five years ago,” adds Jameson, “I employed what we call our MaxMin programming, tasking clients to catalogue the minimum requirements for a project, then expand to their maximum desires, regardless of budget and reality. In between became categories of ‘nice to have.’ Today, we do the same, but we weave together the vast majority of minimum requirements with many ‘nice to haves’…and often more than clients expected of their maximum desires.” ABOVE: A typically dramatic Jameson-designed kitchen, at Vapor House in Bethesda, Maryland.
PAUL WARCHOL
Currently, to become a licensed architect in the U.S. requires an average of 13 years. Among the paths that exist for the aspirant, in California, for example, are a combination of a four- or five-year degree from a program accredited by the National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB), completion of the Architect Registration Examination (ARE), completion of the Architectural Experience Program (AXP) and completion of the California Supplemental Examination (CSE). By contrast, to become a licensed contractor in California, an individual must have four years of journey-level experience in the trade. Becoming a licensed real estate agent, meanwhile, typically takes less than six months’ time.
ABOVE: A corner of the primary bedroom in the Ridgeview Estate House by the list-making San Francisco firm Zack | de Vito Architecture + Construction. “Residential design,” says architect Lise de Vito, “opens up personal conversations about lifestyle, individual family patterns or rituals, hobbies and learning of objects or heirlooms that will tell the story of that particular client or client family—what enriches the new spaces, actually making the whole a ‘home.'”
Cesar Rubio
Each individual possesses their own cohabitating needs, preferences and desires; it is the very reason for embarking on the expenditure and life adventure of creating a custom dwelling. As the architect Ralph Erskine said, “the job of buildings is to improve human relations…architecture must ease them, not make them worse.” Wouldn’t you want to entrust the task of your house’s design—the curation of the ideas that will become the design—to the party with the most education and training in that subject?
In truth, the design of a custom house demands customized services, both specific to the particulars of the project, including the topography and climate, and the particulars of the individuals for whom the design is being created. And while few consumers are at the point of addressing the effects of today’s extreme weather on our houses via the resources that already exist, shouldn’t the design of our living environments receive the level of intellectual rigor and research-based expertise that they deserve?
In Zack | de Vito Architecture + Construction’s Ridgeview Estate House, the office with terrace view is among the client’s personal favorites. “The balance of any project is to actively hold our clients’ engagement and excitement and that we work as a team,” says de Vito.
Cesar Rubio
Who else but the architect can be expected to deliver expertise on living-environment factors such as ergonomics, universal design, proxemics, anthropometrics, sensory components, the social mapping of space, critical environmental challenges, and, perhaps most importantly, the critical importance of the expression of play? The design of a home for the human being is indeed part academic exercise…or at least it ought to be.
Foundations
Over the course of a renowned 50-year career, evidenced by some 300 custom-house designs, the Los Angeles architect Richard Neutra evolved an exhaustive manner of interviewing clients, even by today’s standards. Being widely published, Neutra enjoyed the benefit of clients pursuing him. But once they had arrived before him, whether at his office or, most commonly, at his home, he took nothing for granted. In this first meeting—and usually with his wife, Dionne, diligently taking point-for-point notes beside him—Neutra would spend several hours with a potential client, extracting as many details about them and their project as could be fathomed, from the simple, “What is it that you don’t like about the old house?” to the more abstract, “How do you envision living in the new house?” If the client were a couple, he would have them individually write down their respective daily activities during any given week, starting from the moment they awoke to the moment they went to bed.
ABOVE: Hudson Valley House by Brooklyn-based HGXDESIGN, a Forbes Best-in-State recipient. “As part of our dialogue with the client, we decipher why they are attracted to a particular image and seek out what is driving the emotional connection,” says HGXDESIGN’s principal, Hal Goldstein.
SCOTT FRANCES
ABOVE: The dining area of HGXDESIGN’s Hudson Valley House. “I would say, for us, it takes many conversations to understand a client’s patterns of life. We look at the initial conversation as more of a continuous and ongoing one, a real process of discovery,” says Goldstein. “Sketching is where it starts,” he adds, “with pencil or pen—this is where synthesizing the information we gather happens. This is where the design can naturally grow into itself, or something unique or unexpected can occur.”
Scott Frances
Because Neutra would inevitably spend such an extraordinary amount of time with and tailoring the house to the client, the architect felt it imperative to, early on, develop a sort of intimacy with them—going so far, as his wife characterized it long after his passing in 1970, “for him to be in love with them and to weave a kind of legend around them.”
“I look at my profession like that of a physician,” Neutra would concede to clients, ever so carefully.
Of course, Neutra knew what all the architects in our inaugural Forbes Best-in-State Residential Architects list know all too well: In the client-architect dynamic, perception, too, is paramount.
ABOVE: “Tony Meneguzzo shot this two-story library project for us for a client who collected artwork exclusively of people reading,” says list-making architect Anne Fairfax, of the Palm Beach firm Fairfax Sammons & Partners. “We were asked to design the space to incorporate both books as well as artwork, and artwork storage. Artwork, books and artwork storage all compete with each other for space. It is a unique room in New York, overlooking Central Park. We designed the cabinetry out of maple. The original room was stripped bare and looked like a racquet ball court.”
Tony Meneguzzo
ABOVE: A Palm Beach, Florida, boathouse designed by Fairfax Sammons & Partners. “The owner desired a new building to house their boat in Palm Beach,” says Fairfax. “He also wanted to be able to occupy the space comfortably. These two things, boat storage and living quarters, do not always go together.”
Durston Saylor
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