Today marks our first real interview with an architect.  Up until now, I’ve called and spoken with a handful of architects on the phone, but today we met with one in person.  For anonymity we’ll just call this firm “Architect A”.  We chose to interview this firm because they’re very well known in the Northwest.  They’ve been doing work here for decades and their homes are all over the eastside (usually in developments).  They have a ton of stock plans online, design a lot of homes for builder’s communities and do custom homes as well.  At least one of the other homes in the neighborhood where our land is was designed by Architect A a few years ago too so we figured that they might be a good place to start. 

We arrived at 9am and lo and behold the architect (who is also the owner) had forgotten about our appointment!   The project manager at the firm called the owner and told us that he “had a brain fart and apparently isn’t feeling too well.  It is Monday so who knows what he was up to last night.”  Seriously, that was a direct quote.  Needless to say, that didn’t start things off very well. 

The project manager said that he could meet with us though so we spent the next 45 minutes discussing our future home and their firm.  In the time we were there we pretty much made up our mind that this was definitely not the firm for us.  There was a few things that sealed the deal for this decision:

1. When we asked about their process for gathering information about what we are looking for in our home, they said that we just need to email them our wishlist and then they will come up with a plan.  Can you believe that?  An emailed wishlist?  How are we even supposed to know what to think of if they don’t ask us any questions?  And it seemed that they liked to do everything over the internet – no need to for phone calls or meeting in person.  We would have assumed that it would be a decent sized conversation or process to let them know all about our thoughts of the type of home that we wanted. 
2. He never asked us anything about the style of home that we’re looking to build.  I even had a few photos that I could have showed him, but he didn’t even bother to ask.  He had no idea if we were looking for a craftsman or an Italian villa!
3. We asked if/when they would do a site visit and he said that they try not to do those.  This firm is located about 15 minutes away from our land.  It baffles me that they wouldn’t want to take a look at it to come up with the best idea for a layout.  I do realize that a lot of information can be gathered about a property with photos and a good survey, but come on!  Nothing beats seeing the land in person.  Nothing. 
4. We talked about timeline and I mentioned that it would likely be a lengthy process for us to have a home design since both of us work and we have two boys.  I said that it could take over a month to review a plan for us.  That way we could really digest the design as well as show friends/family for input.  His response was that taking too long means that you forget about what you’ve discussed with them (a.k.a. they forget about you), and that their typical custom home plan takes 8 weeks to design.  8 weeks!!  They could absolutely not design a home in 8 weeks and have it be our perfect home that we’d want to stay in for the rest of our lives. 

The list of things that we completely disliked about them runs about a mile long, but I think that the most important part is that we felt like they just didn’t care about us.  That we were just another number really. 

I’m sure that we could have gotten a pretty basic box of a house from them that would have had the correct number of bedrooms and bathrooms and likely been functional…but it wouldn’t have been “our” home. 

Needless to say, we’re moving on and looking forward to meeting our next architect on Wednesday.  In hindsight, I guess it’s always good to figure out what you don’t want 😉