The How and Why of (This) Residential Architect

16 min readA residential architect’s skill in design and creativity has the power to take a few remodeling dollars farther.

Did you know that average cost to hire a residential architect to design a remodel is $47,000. 

Isn’t that crazy?

That’s more than most people want to spend ON their remodel!

And that’s why architecture in this country is generally for the one percent. I used to work on projects with price tags just like that and … now I don’t. 

I’ve got a good reason for that …

A little residential architect backstory

Way back when I decided to become an architect out of an idealistic dream to help people live better lives in better homes. Architecture school and decade in exactly that kind of design for the 1% nearly beat that out of me.

Now, I do still believe that having a designer makes all the difference!  A residential architect’s skill in design and creativity has the power to take a few remodeling dollars farther. Whether you choose to have someone else do the design on your project or become your own designer, time spent thinking about design by a well prepared person will pay off. Every project deserves the benefits a residential architect creates, even projects with the most modest budget. 

Why we offer a Master Plan

And I knew there had to be a way to bring these benefits to more homeowners. I believe I’ve found it in my affordable just-what-you-need flat fee master master plan package and the mid-century master plan method. I’ve used these tools to help over 250 mid-century homeowners plan affordable, tailored remodels to help their homes last.

And this is the system that has helped Mid Mod Midwest beat our main competitor. The evil specter I find myself constantly competing with in my brain isn’t another architect or interior designer. It’s an absence of design. 

Most remodels in America take place without any design services or design thinking at all. Usually a homeowner decides to improve their house, calls a few contractors, accepts a low bid and begins making changes to their home. 

Now to me, this is the worst case scenario for the homeowner. Design time is essential to ensure that the work gets done at the right size, the right scale and the right fit for the house and the homeowner. We really see our greatest value as providing essential design for homeowners before they connect with the contractor. 

In Today’s Episode You’ll Hear:

  • A summary of the “usual” residential architecture process.
  • Which pieces of this process are must haves for any mid-century homeowner planning a remodel.
  • How to get just the “architecture” you need for a remodel you’ll love! 

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Read the Full Episode Transcript

Did you know that the average cost to hire a residential architect for a remodel is $47,000? That’s crazy. That’s more than most people want to spend on their remodel. And that’s why Residential architecture in this country is generally for the 1%. It’s out of reach. I used to work on projects with price tags just like that. And now, I don’t way back when I decided I wanted to be a Residential architect, I’d have an idealistic dream to help people live better lives and better homes, Residential architecture school, and a decade in exactly that kind of design nearly beat that idealism out of me.

But I knew there had to be a better way. And today I think I found it my affordable just what you need flat fee Master Plan package and the mid-century Master Plan method are the tools I have used to help over 250 mid-century homeowners to plan affordable, tailored remodels to help their homes last.

Hey there. Welcome back to mid mod remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host Della Hansmann, Residential architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You’re listening to Episode 1404. Now this is part three of my mini-series on the why behind big Midwest.

Earlier this summer, I pitched for a small business marketing grant. And in the process of telling a bunch of friendly business minded strangers why we do what we do and why it matters to people. I realized that I was telling them some things I’d never explicitly told you, my dear podcast audience. So two weeks ago, I shared how much I value working with women on their remodels and the way that my masterplan package and the method behind it are calculated to help people develop confidence in their leadership and avoid getting pushed around on their own homes.

Last week, I talked about how I’ve always considered sustainable design to be one of my top priorities. And how I see keeping mid-century homes out of the landfill as the greenest thing I can do with my life. So today I’m going to talk a little bit about our business model. Now, that might not seem like the most obvious sexy topic to share with you who found this podcast because you’d like to hear someone tell you about history or how to in mid-century homes.

But bear with me for a moment, you might still be reeling at that number I threw out at the top of the episode $47,000 For the average design ever remodel. And that’s just the average. If we want to help a lot of people to make good choices for their mid-century homes, we need to make this process a lot more affordable.

And that is exactly what mid mod Midwest does in several key ways. The core of our philosophy, you can get for free by watching our two free master classes that I’ve prepared. Planning an MCN remodel to fit your life and budget is aimed more for the DIY designers among us. And the three secrets of a regret proof remodel is meant more for people who are hoping to hire a designer, but they both give away the whole game the entire masterplan method for the price of your email address.

You don’t even have to give me your main address, although if you do, I’ll send you a mid-mod pep talk on the weekly and remind you to listen to podcasts every week. Now, we also have a host of other free and low cost design resources intended to steer mid-century homeowners in the right direction. And the ready to remodel program gives you forever support in your home update process through our monthly Residential architect Office Hours call. If you want to know more about any of those services or resources, check out the show notes page, which will also have the transcript of the episode at mid mod dash midwest.com/ 1404.

Here’s the thing, all of those free and low cost resources can’t really do. They can’t give you our design eye and expert training. What it means to understand a building in ways that self-trained builders don’t, there is an efficiency to expertise. Most people see their stairs, for example, and assume that’s where they have to be stairs might seem like the metaphorical spine of the house. But actually the spine of the house is in the post and beam structure or in the two by fours and columns in your basement. Stairs are a movable element. In some cases, they can be moved expensively and, in some cases, inexpensively.

Other people will look at a wall and either assume it has structure and can’t be moved. Or assume that because they’ve seen on HGTV that you can open up your kitchen that all the walls in your house can vanish. Now here’s the thing. You’re not a building science expert and you don’t want or need to become one, the builder that you’ll eventually hire won’t necessarily offer some of the more out of the box solutions that could transform your life. That’s not their job. They’re not going to open up cans of worms they don’t need to and that’s not a dig on builders. But what makes a good builder is not what makes a good designer, a manager of details. An excellent craftsman is not necessarily a generator of good ideas.

Residential architects have a skill that more people need design and creativity has the power to take a few remodeling dollars farther than just doing the same thing that your neighbor did. I want to talk about the reasons behind our plan. But first I’m going to roll back to last week. Last week on the podcast I was talking about my mission to keep mid-century homes out of the landfill. Now these mid-century homes are so lovely for so many reasons. They are solid. The last of the old growth pine forests are in the solid two by fours of mid-century ranches and they were designed to be a minimum viable house that homeowner could improve on or time add on to.

And they were right sized to begin as starter homes and ended up as perfect single level agent place homes for anyone of any age. The dream home with the 1950s could be the dream home of next generation, and many more to come. What’s stopping that from happening? Nothing is stopping the houses from just existing unless they get torn down see last week, but it’s just sitting there being the right size in the right neighborhood at a reasonably affordable price relative to our current market. Is that the same as being the dream house of a generation? Not really. These houses do need a bit of tweaking and a little bit of a shine up to really seem great, not just good enough.

And many mid-century buildings, not just homes. commercial buildings hide in plain sight looking bland, boring or even bad because their subtlety is disguised by poor repair and 90s beige paint. They were driven down a main commercial street in your town and noticed a new business going into an existing building. Suddenly, it’s just a mid-century dream. And all they really did was add a fresh coat of paint and a vintage style sign and debased the building. And you think whoa, where’s that been this whole time, it just needed a mid-century glow up to take it back from unpretentious and bland to sleek and effortlessly stylish.

The same is true for mid-century homes. Wrap them in beige vinyl siding, paint the interior trim cottage white and cover the floors and wall to wall carpet. And they’re just boxy small houses in walkable neighborhoods that may or may not have an attached garage. But with a few thoughtful tweaks with the difference that design can make they can glow. They do need those right tweaks though they need a few nudges from someone who cares. And they need to be tuned to match your life. Because here’s the thing you actually know best the list of things your house needs to be a home.

But homeowners like you often feel the least confident in calling the shots in a remodel, call it the used car salesman problem, you will likely remodel only one or maybe two or three homes in a lifetime. But everyone you work with in the remodeling process does this every day. They’re going to feel pretty confident compared to your sense of what should happen even when you know in your heart that you wanted it to be that way for reasons. I don’t want to point fingers. But the remodeling industry as a whole runs in ruts repeating the HGTV choices that age like milk, and constantly pushing a bigger is better mentality than promising to make up the difference in cheap materials.

Having a designer makes all the difference. But again, most home updates in America take place without any design input at all. My nightmare. Design thinking not even necessarily by a designer but that thinking process the time it takes to wait to evaluate your choices to weigh things against each other. To test out different ideas is essential to ensure that remodeling is done at the right scale and in the right style, that the work you’re taking on is a good fit for the house. And for you the homeowner, rushing your decisions and taking on remodels quickly without taking time for design. Without asking the right questions leads to remodeler’s regret without fail.

But it’s pretty clear why most people don’t work with a designer Residential architecture is wildly unaffordable to most people. It can run from that average $47,000 for the Residential architect and up to hundreds of 1000s of dollars. fee structures for design are generally an unpredictable number of hours and an hourly rate or a percent of the assumed construction cost. And it’s a really frustrating thing. But as you know if you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, I’m an idealist and I wanted to come up with a better way to make this happen.

For me, when I came back to Madison found a mid-century ranch and started to sing the song of my mid-century people. I helped my sister’s friend and then a neighbor of mine and then more local mid-century homeowners to plan better, smaller, tailored remodels to make their homes last I lowball my prices in the early days, and I also centralized the classic process I’d been trained in as I went, I kept asking myself, what do people need to know most before they got started, I wanted to find a way to give the homeowners I worked with all the venture benefits of the conventional design methods I was trained to use for the smallest fraction of the potential cost.

And over time, I turned that philosophy of what’s essential into our process, the mid-century Master Plan method, which lets us identify what matters most to our clients quickly assess homes, set a clean and timeless style, offer options that people can weigh to gain confidence and tune their budget and then end up with a clear set of design documents they can use to find the right builder. We took this even further when we realized in the pandemic that it was possible for homeowners to measure and document their own homes and we could carry on with our design work remotely.

So that the next time that someone reached out to me from California asking if I could help I said yes. And now we’ve masterplan remodels in Florida and Minnesota in Washington State and Washington DC, all over the country. Mid Midwest exists at event diagram overlap of several different design markets. What we do now, because of this winding journey I’ve taken to offering design and a fixed fee package is a little different than a bunch of other ways that homeowners usually seek out help to plan their remodel.

So I thought I would touch on a couple of the alternatives and talk about why they work and why they don’t in certain cases. Theoretically, we compete with other residential architecture firms and our custom design packages. But it’s not really a one to one overlap because our fixed fee design service package offers a different service from the much more linear hourly rate services of the traditional Residential architectural services model.

When you hire a conventional Residential architect, they will offer you some or all of a linear menu of services. Usually they want you to go from start to finish, but you start at the start no matter what and sort of work your way through until you want to go on your own. Typically, those services begin with schematic design. That’s the ideation phase. It includes studying the program what the design needs to do, testing usually multiple options for different directions the design could go in. In my last firm, This often involves preparing several sketched floor plans or diagrams, and asking the client to pick one would usually get them some Pinterest photo boards at the same time.

Once they picked a plan, we proceed to the DD phase Devine development. This is where the bulk of the details get worked out. The goal of this phase is to prepare a nearly full set of floor plans, elevations section drawings, Interior Elevations, lighting diagrams, the works, this can be the stage at which a project goes to permit. And sometimes a first round of contractor contacts happened here. But more details still gets fixed in the construction document phase. CDs firms up every detail and it becomes the basis of a contract with the builder. There are schedules lists of every door window and finish material, every design choice is locked in contractors will undertake to build the project as exactly as it is drawn and specified and bid specifically against those drawings and specifications.

So then managing the bid process is another phase of work often done by a Residential architect, because the firm can communicate clearly on behalf of the owner exactly what the design is, and make sure contractor bids are clear enough to be compared apples to apples to apples. Finally, the Residential architect can manage the project going to the site and observing progress to again ensure for the owner that everything happens exactly as it was designed. Now all of that is great stuff. But it’s also a lot of work. And part of the reason that it can add up to 10s or hundreds of 1000s of dollars to hire a team of Residential architects to do for the length of time that it takes to think up and then finish building a building. And how are those large dollar figures even calculated?

I think every single residential architecture firm has a slightly different way of thinking about their services and pricing them out. But often is a combination of a fixed fee, for some part of the kickoff of the project, an hourly rate for some amount of the design work and or a percentage of the overall construction cost estimated or bid. Now I have my feelings about working as a percentage of the construction costs. This is actually often the way that interior designers work, which is more fair for them since they’re involved in the management of occurring of all the things from my point of view, when you bill yourself as a rate of the percentage of the construction cost, you are hitching your wagon to the idea that a bigger and more expensive project is better for you.

A properly ethical Residential architect shouldn’t be fluffing out a project to make it more expensive. So their percentage goes up. But they’re never really being encouraged to make the project smaller. And then those hourly rates, it’s also counterintuitively, a problematic way to pay someone for their time. Of course, it makes sense that the number of hours they work should be compensated by a number of dollars. Lawyers love to build this way we’re all pretty familiar to with the idea that lawyers like to be on the clock. This maybe feels like a cheap shot. We love to villainize lawyers, but let’s just think about it we’ve ever seen a TV show or a movie, you can be familiar with that sort of villainous character who likes to build their client for the 15 minutes they thought about someone while eating breakfast.

Now designers on the other hand, are more likely to undervalue for their hours and overbill you after all, I guarantee your Residential architect will be thinking about your design while walking their dog while eating breakfast while getting to work. And probably for an hour or two after they should have gone to sleep at night for best mental health outcomes. But I’ve never yeah, I’ve never met a Residential architect who bills for much more time than they spend sitting at the drafting table or their computer. I think that actually Residential architects and our clients both are prey a little bit to the concept that what we do is a skill, a profession, but also an art form.

And are artists always supposed to do what they do for free anyway, sure it’s a job. But if it’s a calling, wouldn’t you do it if no one paid you?

So from a designer’s point of view, billing hourly for your work runs the risk of not actually charging appropriately for the amount of your life energy you give up thinking about the project. And on the other hand, experience makes for efficiency, which makes hourly rates more confusing. The same work done by two Different people who are more or less experienced in a particular sub discipline of Residential architecture, a particular style, like mid-century, for example, can be done more or less efficiently based on that experience. And just as you go through your career things that take you more time when you’re young, and you need to do code research, contemplate options and get double checked by colleagues or collaborators later can be something you can solve at a glance, I’ve certainly experienced that.

Of course, the job, the reward for a job well done is always another job, and usually a harder one. But it can feel problematic to charge for your hours rather than your expertise.

Once you hit a certain level of expertise. This is part of the reason that in the end, I felt that we could charge more for our value than for a specific number of hours we spent on a project so much for other Residential architects, I love them. I sometimes miss doing that traditional design work. But I generally find that by the time, a potential client of ours gets on a zoom call with me, I already know that our model will be the best fit for their job. You see, our package of design services, is what I’ve calculated as those most essential parts of the super long list of time sensitive details, what every model can least afford to do without.

And I was chatting with a potential future masterplan client today, in fact. She shared with me that she had scheduled a walkthrough with a local Residential architect before calling me up. He was lovely, she said, But I’ve given her some odd feeling advice for the house advice that made her realize that he was more used to dealing with the owners of craftsman homes and mid-century ranchos, like her own. And he’d given her a confusing quote, sharing his hourly rate that was clear, and then a guesstimate of how many hours he thought her project might take him. The upper range of the hours was half again, the lower one, and that big gap worried her. What if it took him longer than he’d estimated?

Now, I can’t speak for that other residential architect, but I probably understand his unwillingness to promise a specific number of hours, every design project is unique. Every client can ask for different amounts of work. And it can be difficult to know in advance how much time that work will take. But that’s part of the advantage for us at mid mod Midwest of our masterplan system, we have a fairly precise idea of our general project oriented time because we know our process, and we always approach our design with the same starting materials, we know that if one part of the house presents more difficulty, we can fall back on our experience in other areas and usually keep a consistent projected hourly budget. Even if we don’t the overage doesn’t come down on our clients. They know what they’re paying in advance.

Okay, Residential architects. Let’s talk about interior designers, I’ll talk about them actually a little less, because their expertise is not mine. I know a lot more about what a traditional residential architect does, because I used to be one. Now, there’s a lot of credit I have to give to interior designers and they might be the right fit for your project. It depends on what you want. Because there’s a lot you can do to change your house with an accumulation of subtle but well calculated tweaks and expanded window, a shifted sink layout, and new finishes all over interior designers are trained to help you do just that the best. And they will hold your hand or work on your behalf to select every single element in the house from Basa to furniture, we don’t do what they do.

Our Master Plan package stops around the schematic design phase, we focus on the big picture of what you want to change about the way you live in your house rather than those most subtle details. But they also don’t do what we do. Interior Designers are generally not versed in additions, structural changes or bigger moves than changing the layout of a single room. Sometimes not even that. I think knowing whether you want to work with an interior designer or with a Residential architect or with mid mod Midwest depends on the scope and scale of what you’re hoping to change in your house and how hands on you want to be with that process.

But really our main competitor, the evil specter I find myself constantly competing with in my brain isn’t another residential architect. It’s an absence of design. Because again, most remodels in America take place without any design services or design thinking at all. So the typical solution is that a homeowner decides to improve their house and then calls a few contractors accepts a low bid and begins making changes to their home.

Now to me, this is the worst case scenario for the homeowner and even for the builder because it hopscotch Is that necessary focusing step of devoting time to design. Design time is so essential to ensure that the work gets done at the right size, the right scale and the right fit for the house and the homeowner. So we really see our greatest work, our market opportunity to business speak at you to step in quickly into the middle of that process and provide that essential design service for homeowners before they connect with the contractor to make their plans happen.

There you have it a little more idea I hope than when you started listening of why mid Midwest works the way that we do. We are an unusual little outfit. Not only are we the only residential architecture firm I know of specializing only in remodels for mid-century homes. Hey if I’m wrong, and you are or know of another firm like that, tell me about them. I want us to be friends.

But we’re also rare in our approachable flat fee masterplan package business model because my goal is to make remodels more affordable, more manageable and better designed for as many people as possible. So if you find that you would like our help with your project, you know where to find us start with the show notes page for this very episode mid mod dash midwest.com/ 1404.

We would love to work on a master plan for you, or to walk you through the steps of creating one on your own and are ready to remodel home or design program. And that brings us to the end of this little three part series on the behind the scenes stories of why we do what we do at mid Midwest. So stay tuned for next week. I’ll be telling you that your mid-century home was designed for an easy addition and I’ll share some of my favorite design tips for making the most of adding on to an MCM home. See you then. 

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