Local House Plan Architects Versus the Best Expert
House Plan Architects are not a commodity:
Should you have local house plan Architects or the very best nationwide expert?
House plan architects and options: Good question. Let’s take a look at reasons for both local house plan architects and for the very best that you can find. If you are looking for a standard, normal home with nothing much that distinguishes it from other residences in your area, then you are probably best served by engaging local house plan architects. They will provide you with a design probably very similar to others that they and their peers have designed for people just like you in your local area.
If, on the other hand, you consider your needs to be special and that your family is special, unique, and have a desire for a house that is not the run of the mill, you may wish to consider finding that nationwide expert. Perhaps you need house plan architects of the type of house that energizes and excites your imagination. For instance, if you want a residence that is primarily contemporary, has an exterior of white stucco and has orange barrel tile, you probably want house plan architects whose homes look like that. Check out their portfolio and find those firms and have them design your house.
Or, maybe you are looking for a more timeless quality from your house plan architects. Maybe you want more of an elegantly rustic design plan, with muscular timber beams, substantial stonework and giant windows on the rear capturing spectacular views. The field of options for house plan architects offering this sort of design is considerably narrowed. There are perhaps a dozen or so that are really good at this, on a world-class level throughout the United States. And even less that understand sophisticated methods like Open Plan Home Design. And even less that have appeared in books and magazines across the world. There is one that satisfies all of these parameters: Rand Soellner Architect. That is probably why you are on this website and why you have found your way to this page. Because you are looking for house plan architects with a special flavor of timeless rustic elegance that is bold, beautiful and thrilling all at the same time.
Okay, now that you have found the home architects that you believe best capture the imagery of your proposed residence, you have noticed something: they do not happen to live in your hometown. Hmmm. Is this a problem? Can they properly design and administer your residential project from wherever they live? YES. How?
How Specialist World Class House Plan Architects Design and Manage projects all over the USA and the World:
Probably the most convincing and obvious factor to remember is that we now live in an electronic digital information age. The Internet has made everyplace on the planet, which includes throughout the USA, immediately and instantaneously accessible to every other place on the planet. Your Best Expert house plan architects can easily do nearly everything remotely, using the Internet and computers to find out information about your proposed building sites, including analyzing the views on your site, researching the best possible contractors to consider building your residence, and to see what is happening during the construction of your house, including reviewing contractor submittals and other documentation. Sound impossible? It is Very possible. Rand Soellner is doing it. Here is how:
1. SITE SELECTION ANALYSIS AND VIEW EXAMINATION: Rand Soellner Architect has the entire world in 3 dimensions in their computers. It is a constantly updated, very accurate model of the entire planet. Yes. The entire planet. It usually lags behind only a couple of years. High-resolution digital photos from orbiting satellites are merged to create this model. Once Soellner understands what the geographic coordinates are of your possible sites, or the street address, he can immediately fly over your house site in virtual reality, almost as if he had rented a helicopter in your hometown and flown over your location. He can turn the horizon line and “land” on your site and step out and look around. He can see the topography of your views. Actually, because the trees and other vegetation are only visible from the top down “plan view,” Soellner can see things that you cannot, even when you are on your site. This is because Soellner’s view allows him to see what lays beyond the vegetation. In other words, he can see what is there in your view directions that you cannot see, because the vegetation blocks your view, but not his view. Soellner can perform this analysis swiftly from his home office in North Carolina, for your site, no matter where it is in the world, much less the USA.
Soellner recently performed this analysis for a client who was considering locating a resort in the Honduran mountains. Soellner immediately conducted a virtual reality helicopter tour, hopping from mountaintop to mountaintop throughout Central America! Rand Soellner can perform this study for a variety of sites that you may be considering. When you and Rand perhaps make a short list of perhaps the leading 2 or 3 sites, you may wish to consider having him travel to your local area to conduct an in-person review of the remaining best land choices. The point is, the bulk of the site selection analysis can be accomplished remotely. Also, this technique often provides information not obtainable from field investigations, and they are very economical, requiring only minutes to perform a site reconnaissance. Being national house plan architects has allowed Soellner to develop such effective techniques.
2. SURVEYORS ARE THE LOCAL PROFESSIONALS THAT PROVIDE THE DETAILED INFORMATION ABOUT YOUR SELECTED SITE: Contrary to some perceptions, it is the surveyors whom you engage to personally go to your land to perform exacting measurements of the dimensions of your ground, the building setbacks, the utility locations, precise angles of various views (as requested by your house plan architects), and the topography. They produce a plan view of all of these features. More often than not, they do this work electronically. Your house plan architects should coordinate with your surveyors so that the survey is in a format and has the information they need to design your project. So, the surveyors e-mail their electronic survey to your architect. Do your desginers have to be present on the site to supervise the surveyors? Absolutely not. This would not happen, even if you had a local design company. It is all done electronically these days. When the surveyor e-mails their survey plan to the house designers, the electronic survey, with all of its detailed information about your site, becomes the “canvas” upon which your house plan architects draw. Quite often it serves as your Site Plan template. Once again: does being a local house architect provide something better about this than if the designer was located somewhere else? No; not at all. There is no advantage here for a local architect, because the surveyor is the one obtaining all of the exact site plan information.
3. REVIEW OF LOCAL POSSIBLE CONTRACTORS & PRELIMINARY PRICING BY YOUR HOUSE PLAN ARCHITECTS: Rand Soellner recently conducted an investigation of over 100 local house contractors in the Washington State Tacoma area. He did this entirely remotely. How was this possible? Soellner contacted a nationwide database of a premier home contractor organization online. He found over a hundred local house builders in the database. He looked at their websites and eliminated about 80% of them and only kept those final 25 or so he thought might be the best for this particular project, which was in Seabeck Bay, Washington. Soellner further examined the credentials of these firms and through additional consideration, cut the list down to about 10 or 12 that seemed best suited for the project. Soellner had a phone conference call with the his client, for whom he was designing a house. Soellner and the client narrowed the list down to about 5 or 6 finalists. Soellner then contacted each of these companies by phone, had them call up his website and had them look at various examples of his projects that were closest in appearance to what he was developing for this particular client. Then he asked if the various contractors were interested and what they might charge to build a house of this appearance in that community in a dollar per square foot range of cost. Soellner obtained a list of references from each of these builders and called checked what former clients had to say about each of these builder’s performance. Soellner checked online with State government regarding the license numbers of each of the builders to see if there were any complaints or other issues and that they were in fact licensed contractors.
Soellner created preliminary bid forms and outline specifications to go with his preliminary drawings and conducted an apples-to-apples “soft bid” to help his client obtain a range of cost understanding of what his home might cost, as they continued to develop the design. How many other house plan architects, local or national have you ever heard of doing that? This is one of the reasons you obtain world-class talent to help you on your project. Most local firms simply are not used to doing this and don’t know how to do this in this manner. Prices obtained were right about in the middle average of what Soellner believed would happen, based on his developing house plans.
The entire process above was conducted entirely online, through e-mails and phone conversations. It simply was not necessary to meet in person to do any of it. How would being local have made this any more accurate, faster or better? It wouldn’t.
Sometimes, it is better to just obtain the best talent available. If that firm, like the Rand Soellner company, knows how to efficiently design and manage your project remotely, what concerns should there be?
4. CONSTRUCTION ADMINISTRATION: LOCAL VERSUS REMOTE PROCESSES: one might think that your house plan architects have to have their office right down the street from your project in order to have the kind of attention your project needs and deserves. This is not the case. While certainly there is a convenience factor in having your house plan architects living and working in the local vicinity of your project, the fact is, you could no more afford to pay them to be at your project daily that you could a national firm. House architects just aren’t typically paid to be at your site daily.
So, would a national firm like Rand Soellner Architect come to your site during construction? Sure; just as often as you would like to pay them to do so. How would they manage your project in the interim time between actually, physically being there? Good question. Soellner requires the builders of his client homes to post digital photos of all areas of the project weekly, indicating what has happened that week. This can also be supplemented with digital videos, with sound, and with the camera moving and sweeping the entire area. So, there is not much that they an in-person individual would see that the remote information process would also not capture.
Furthermore, the Soellner firm requires all product and other submittals to be digital, which are e-mailed to them from the builder. Therefore, the charge to mailing and sending paper is all but eliminated and become more efficient than even local paper churning. This is also consistent with the American Institute of Architects green policies about avoiding paper wastage in our developing understanding about how what we consume impacts our planet. Soellner can handle any project problem areas by having the builder video and photograph the situation and e-mail that, then have a phone conference call to discuss the resolve such situations.
Once again, from time to time, a national architectural expert like Soellner can fly or drive to your site, as the project requires. The only possible minor disadvantage to this is that, yes, there will be some additional travel expense for professionals who live outside of your immediate are to visit your project site in person. However, the frequency of such in person visits can be minimized and confined to widely spaced critical points in the project. Soellner has handled some projects without the owners wishing to pay for any on-site physical representation and because of the advancements in the Internet and digital transmission technology, this is possible, especially for house plans architects.
5. SPECIAL NATIONAL HOUSE PLAN ARCHITECTS KNOWLEDGE THAT CAN SAVE YOU MONEY: Engaging a company like Rand Soellner Architect to design your house plan means that you are getting one of the best home architects in the world to design and administer your project. They are cost competitive in fees, typically charging no more than some local house plan architects. They also have the nationwide and worldwide expertise to employ Home Value Engineering techniques that can help prioritize what’s important to you in your house plan and package your design in such a way that gives you the most bang for your buck. Now that is skill worth paying more for, but, once again, the Soellner firm is competitively priced with most local house plan architects. So there is no reason to Not obtain the very best counsel and design skills possible for your residential design. And there are many reasons to engage the best house plan architects that you can: they will design the best house possible for your maximum enjoyment and help you prioritize the features in your house, so that you are in control of what you decide to pay your builder to construct your dream residence. These are skills hard to find in many localities. It is concentrated in national firms like Rand Soellner, with nationwide skillsets.
CONCLUSION: It makes a lot of sense to hire the best house plan architects possible for your residential project. Local design firms have little, if any advantage over the nationwide knowledge assets of residential design companies like the Soellner firm. Soellner specializes as house plan architects. Not many local companies can do this; they have to be involved in various project types in order to be able to earn a living, because there may not be an adequate number of people locally engaging design companies to design their houses. Therefore, the local design companies may not have the concentrated focus like a national house plan firm like Soellner. If you like the designs produced by your local firms, then by all means, hire them. If you are looking for something special, like what Rand Soellner does, then please seriously consider engaging the Soellner firm.
