The Ideal Design/Build Client
Many consumers — because of a proliferation of home makeover television programs, books, magazines, and the Internet — have become more interested, sophisticated, and educated about design possibilities and about design/build. To illustrate his point about clients understanding the value of design and willing to pay to find the best fit, Kelly cites a recent example of a client with a quarter-million dollar project who “paid three design/build contractors to do preliminary designs.”
Despite the heightened awareness, not every consumer is the right client for design/build, according to the roundtable group. They see the upper–middle class as their target market.
“Middle income people are more price conscious and will go to the big box, and some of it’s going to be done for them and some of it they’re going to do themselves,” Kelly says.
Tom Swartz agrees. “Not until you get up to the upper–middle income is when architects come into play.”
Yet the very wealthy, too, are not good candidates for design/build. “They want to deal only with the owner … at every stage of the game,” Swartz says, “and it doesn’t change and it doesn’t get very pretty.” Says Richardson, “If there’s a client that’s too, too wealthy, we encourage them to work with an independent architect.”
If not every consumer is a match for the process, neither is every project. While costs can vary across the country, there seems to be agreement on the kind of project roundtable participants will invest time in.
Often a job is too small and doesn’t require much design or is something they can easily create with CAD. Conversely, a job could be too big and require a year or more effort and a construction trailer on site and design/build is not the most efficient process. “The sweet spot,” says Richardson, “is the family room addition with a kitchen, powder room renovation, and a deck.”
Finding a Designer
It would seem that any remodeler can find a draftsperson and call the business design/ build. But it takes more of an integrated approach to make it successful. “Design/build is very much a team process,” Richardson says. “I don’t think all aspects of remodeling or architecture are necessarily a team sport.” “We actually have a real tough time hiring independent architects as designers, or as what we call a project designer, because …the concept of team is one that they’ve never understood.”
Finding architects or designers was difficult in the 1990s, says Kelly, because of “competition from high-tech industry and from other industries that were paying higher salaries and attracting more young people.” In his market, at least, it’s become easier in the past few years.
Lucky for Kelly, he has Oregon State University, which has a design program. Students learn design from a retail perspective, he says, and the program uses “the CKD and CBD curriculum. [Students] get a light duty kind of overview of residential construction. But they come out of there fairly well trained in what we do.” Kelly hires OSU graduates and “they spend at least two years as design assistants working for an experienced sales designer.”
Several in the group suggested more architecture schools could add interior design programs to their traditional commercial focus.
Despite a degree, not every designer is up to the challenge of every project. For a $125,000 project, Richardson says,“the level of talent and level of skills that you need are very different than if you call yourself design/build and your average project is $22,000. They all have degrees in architecture, some registered some not,” but a designer’s skill level needs to match the project’s scale.
Not surprisingly, design and sales functions are closely related in a design/build company. At Kelly’s firm, “We hire more for ability in design than we do capability in sales or estimating, and we help them do that.”
Klein’s salespeople “are design sensitive,” he says, “but they are more focused on listening to the customer, figuring out what that customer wants and then saying, ‘We will get this designed.’ Who designs it is immaterial.”
For Kelly the design/sales approach is vertically integrated. “If our CKD, who’s also a CBD, is doing a major whole-house remodel, she’s leading the design team. She’s got a sales assistant who works for her doing all the interior drawings and she’s got an architect from outside the company who’s doing the exterior.”