Partners in your building success

Our clients feel they designed their new home themselves.  

House design requires collaboration between designer and owner.  In fact, the way we work at Keystone Architects is more like facilitation.  We work closely with our clients to guide them step by step through the design process. Design is actually making decisions, one decision at a time. It is our role to take the stress out of making these decisions by offering enough information to inform the choices.  

Most of us live in housing of some form and have strong ideas of our wants and needs.  There is an endless supply of eye candy available to assist with choosing and explaining the "look" or approach desired. We don't all have knowledge of building processes and materials and will all need different amounts of assistance.

Some people will have been haunting display homes and know exactly what they want, if only it was on offer. For them we can prepare a set of working drawings to take to several builders for comparative quotes.  To this we can add a design tweaking service to ensure the chosen plan will suit the selected site.

Others will be confident enough in their own dream and taste to prepare rough sketches of their ideas.  For them we start with developed design stage, drawing the client's sketch to scale and in three dimensions so they can see it.  After the few inevitable adjustments the design is ready to turn into working drawings.

Still others will provide a brief that is a written list of all the features they want included.  We work with each item on the list to check our understanding of its meaning and to discuss how the spaces desired should relate to each other.  We then prepare several sketch designs for detailed discussion.  Both likes and dislikes are important to understand. Once we have an approved sketch we are ready to move onto design development and ultimately working drawings.