Adding Value by Design

Adding Value by Design One of the most difficult ideas to get through to a new client is that the price for commissioning an experienced architect is likely to be more than other designers who also offer a similar service.

There is a practical side to designing any house or building and sometimes the aspirations for a new home is simply to copy a previously tested design with some minor amendments. In these cases the designer will be able to achieve a design that looks similar to current trends in house design.

The majority of houses in the rural context in Ireland are probably designed by this method and there is a place for this straightforward approach to new houses. In the case of a modest house on a restricted budget both client and designers are happy with the arrangement.

This arrangement however gets into difficulty when the designer is asked to design a larger more complicated house. With no template to follow and a complex client brief the inexperienced designer struggles to hold the design together in a unified way. Often you will see a large new house on a prominent site and say that something is just not right!

Paul McAlister architects have carried out an analysis of a particularity bad example of one of these houses to indicate the pitfalls of employing a cheap or inexperienced designer. We have taken the time to highlight many of the mistakes in this design and have suggested how the same client brief may have been met in another way.

A house which is trying to be classically elegant but the design lacks something?

When the same client house brief is presented to an experienced architect, they must provide their full set of skills to ensure that the beauty or elegance of the completed design is not lost.

In the case of Paul McAlister Architects, we strive to design houses that are a lasting legacy of good design and proportion. We make a huge effort to ensure that our houses provide all the rooms required but also have that elusive element of beauty and proportion which is so difficult to measure as an added value.

This added value of design may only become truly apparent when the house is completed. In the case of a poorly designed house it is too expensive at construction stage to change the building works and the house must be completed as designed.

This issue highlights the value of good design at an early stage.

Good design should be appreciated for the added value an experienced architect will bring to a project. An architects fee is a small cost to pay to ensure that you have a beautiful house.

For anyone wondering how we fixed it? This is the end result!