Questions to Ask an Architect Before Hiring Them: What the Answers Actually Reveal

By Tina Modrusan

Regulatory information reviewed September 7, 2026

The list is not the point

For a homeowner choosing an architect for a major renovation, whether a townhouse, a brownstone, a co-op or condo, or an apartment combination, the questions are rarely the problem. Most people arrive at some version of the same ones: the relevant experience, the fee, the process, the references, who is actually on the team, what happens during construction. The problem is that the answers all sound reasonable, because a shortlisted architect can usually give a polished, plausible account of any of them, which makes verbal confidence hard to tell apart from demonstrated capability.

So the useful question sits underneath the one being asked: what does this answer actually establish? A confident, articulate response can be strong evidence, weak evidence, or none at all, depending on what it is a response to, and the difference is not audible in the room. What follows is the set of questions a homeowner close to hiring needs to resolve, and, for each, the thing most articles leave out: what the answer can settle, what it can't, and what to do with the gap. In New York, some of the most consequential constraints on a renovation are ones a finished photograph never shows. A co-op board, landmark restrictions, a structural move, an occupied building: telling apart the experience that has met these from the experience that hasn't is much of the decision.

Illustration 2: Same Room, Different Problem

Two finished interiors can photograph almost identically while the work behind them differs entirely: one a simple refit, the other a combined unit with a wall removed and plumbing stacked over a neighbor below.

Have you done a project like mine before?

This is the right question, and the answer is often yes, which is why it settles less than it seems to.

A project can look familiar in a photograph and have been a completely different piece of work. A prewar apartment renovation, a townhouse gut, and a brownstone restoration can all produce a calm, beautiful finished interior while the actual difficulty lived somewhere the photograph doesn't show: combining two units, moving structure, getting through a co-op's alteration review, coordinating consultants, keeping a landmarked façade legal, running the job in an occupied building with neighbors below. Two firms can show the same serene room. One built it around a structural opening and a board that took three rounds of drawings; the other had an empty apartment, no landmark, and a contractor it had used for a decade.

Relevance is not resemblance.

The photograph won't tell those two firms apart. The useful follow-up will: not have you done something like this, but what made that project difficult, and what was your role when the difficulty appeared? The first question gets a yes. The second gets a specific account, the week the wall opened, the round of drawings the board sent back, or it gets a return to the finished images. The specific account is the more useful evidence of the two.

This is also where New York separates experience that looks alike. Two firms can show comparable prewar apartments, but if one project ran through a co-op's alteration review, a DOB filing, or Landmarks review and the other did not, they represent different experience regardless of how similar the rooms appear. When you ask whether a firm has done a project like yours, the approval process the project had to clear is part of what "like yours" means.

Who actually did the work you're showing me?

A portfolio belongs to the firm. The work in it belongs to particular people, and those are not always the same thing.

Look hardest at the project that made you call. If one thing in the portfolio stands apart from the rest, bolder, more particular, the detail you keep returning to, it is worth asking who drove it, because a project that stands apart from the firm's usual work deserves a closer look at who actually shaped it. It may have come from the principal you're meeting. It may also have come from a gifted young architect who has since left to open their own practice, or an associate whose name is no longer on the door. The building is still there and the photograph is still real; the person who made the decisions that produced it may be gone.

A portfolio shows the work a practice presents as its own. It does not establish who inside the practice produced it, or who will produce yours.

Who will actually work on my project?

The person across the table is often not the person who will run the job, and the shape of that gap depends on the kind of practice you're hiring.

A solo practitioner may touch nearly every decision personally, which can be the appeal and also the limit, because one person's attention is finite and your project competes with every other one they've taken. A small or mid-sized studio often pairs a principal's judgment with a project architect who carries the daily coordination; the thing to establish is how present the principal actually stays once the work is underway, and who you'll have on the phone on an ordinary Tuesday. A larger firm can bring more resources, deeper experience with filings, and more staff, and sometimes more distance between the person who won the work and the people doing it.

None of these is the right answer. The question is which one you're being offered, and whether it matches what you expect. The interview is the moment to establish the actual proposed staffing rather than rely on an assumption,

so the useful version is specific: who is my daily contact, who is in the room when a condition behind a wall isn't what the drawings assumed, and who decides when those two people disagree. "The team will be involved" is not an answer. A name, a role, and where it's written down is.

Two things sit next to that question. The first is capacity: a practice can be well suited to your project and still be the wrong choice this year if it can't staff the work now, so it's worth asking what else is in the studio and when they could actually start. The second is continuity: ask what happens if the project architect assigned to you leaves partway through, because on a renovation that runs a year or more, that is a real possibility rather than a hypothetical. It is also worth asking how the schedule breaks down, across design, approvals, bidding or procurement, and construction, and which of those stages depend on the building, a board, a consultant, or the contractor rather than on the architect alone, because those are the parts a timeline can't fully promise.

Illustration 2: The Interview as Evidence

The interview is where the questions get asked and where a fluent answer is easiest to mistake for proof of how the project will actually go.

What do you think is difficult about this project?

This one works differently from the rest, because it puts the evidence in how the architect thinks rather than in what they've done.

You have lived with this project for months and you know where the uncertainties are: the wall you're not sure can move, the board, the part of the apartment that makes everything else complicated. An architect who has engaged with it may name some of them without being asked. That is a different kind of evidence from a polished account of past success. It shows what they are attending to and how they frame the project at the outset, though not that they have fully understood it. It is not a request for free design, and it shouldn't be treated as one; the value is in the framing, not in a solution produced on the spot. What it can't tell you is whether they'll execute, since a sharp diagnosis and a well-run construction phase are different capabilities, but it is one of the few questions that requires the architect to respond to your actual project rather than describe a generic process.

What exactly is included in your proposal?

Two proposals can use the same words and describe genuinely different amounts of work, and the words that matter most are the ones about who does what the architect doesn't.

Ask where the scope actually stops. Are the structural engineer, the expediter, the MEP or lighting consultant inside the fee or contracted and paid separately, and who hires and coordinates them, you or the architect? Does the architect help choose fixtures, finishes, and lighting, or does their involvement end at the drawings and the filing? If there's no interior designer on the project, the answer to that last question decides who is making a hundred decisions you may be assuming someone else will handle. A proposal that reads as thorough is not the same as a service that is complete; a longer document can promise less than a short one, depending on what each actually assigns.

A detailed scope is not bureaucracy, and a thorough contract is not a sign of distrust. The thing that damages a renovation is the assumption: the item everyone thought was included, discovered in month three to belong to no one. Clarity here protects both sides, which is why the way an architect handles this conversation is itself evidence. A precise scope is one the architect can walk you through line by line, and a vague one is worth pressing on until it isn't.

What happens once construction begins?

This is one of the hardest questions for an interview to answer, and one of the most consequential.

Everything before construction, the design, the drawings, the meetings, is the part an architect can show you. Construction administration is an important part of translating design intent through construction and responding when the built condition tests the drawings, and almost none of it is visible in a portfolio or a first meeting. It's worth being concrete about what the phase contains, because "we stay involved" is what everyone says and it settles nothing. Under the standard AIA framework, an architect's construction-phase role can include reviewing submittals and shop drawings, visiting the site on a schedule, reviewing the contractor's payment applications, interpreting the drawings when they're ambiguous, and rejecting work that doesn't conform.^[1]The same framework draws the opposite line clearly: the architect does not control the contractor's means, methods, or site safety. That is the builder's. A different contract moves those lines, which is exactly why "we'll be there for you" is worth nothing until there's a clause behind it.

Construction is where the drawings meet the parts of the building nobody could see.

A wall opens and the condition behind it isn't what anyone assumed. A specified product is discontinued and the substitution changes the cost or the look. A consultant's number contradicts an architectural detail. Each of those is a decision, each has an owner, and each arrives on a timeline that doesn't wait for a site visit scheduled three weeks out. In a co-op, or in an apartment combination undertaken in an occupied building, the pressure is sharper: the work runs under the building's rules and the neighbors' tolerance, on a schedule an alteration agreement and a board can constrain. In a landmarked building the exterior adds its own layer. Most changes to a front or rear façade in a historic district require Landmarks Preservation Commission review, and even broad in-kind replacement is not automatically exempt.^[2]

A useful answer here has a rhythm: how often they're on site, what they review and when, how RFIs and changed conditions move and who is responsible for them. A general answer doesn't establish anything about their history; it simply leaves more unresolved, which is itself worth noticing. The answer can describe the intended process, but it can't prove they're good at it. Past clients, contractors, and project records can provide evidence about construction-phase performance that an interview cannot.

Illustration 3:
Where the Drawing Meets the Building

This is the point where design documents meet a condition no one could see, and a technical problem becomes a question of money, scope, and responsibility.

How do you work when cost, scope, or conditions change?

A promise that the construction budget will hold is a claim an architect can't really support, because no one party sets the final construction price on its own. It moves with the contractor's pricing, market conditions, the conditions inside the walls, the design and specification choices, and the owner's own changes. That is not the same as saying budget is outside the architect's responsibility. An architect has real responsibility for designing to the budget, testing cost as the design develops, and surfacing the trade-offs as decisions rather than letting them accumulate. What they cannot do is guarantee the number a contractor will ultimately name. Cost and scope can change substantially on a renovation, and the useful thing to understand is what happens when they do.

Consider, as one illustration, a project that begins as a $1 million renovation and arrives at construction as a $2.8 million one. A change of that size doesn't, by itself, tell you why the cost moved or who was responsible, and that is the point. It could come from any of several directions, often at once: the renovation a homeowner pictured turning out to belong to a more expensive category than the budget named, once design made the wishes concrete; specification choices; the contractor's pricing; a wall that opens onto a condition no one could have priced.

Someone can say, honestly, "I have a $1 million budget," while carrying in their head a custom kitchen, better stone, restored original detail, moved walls, and new systems, a set of wishes that quietly belongs to a different project. The problem is rarely dishonesty. It is that the project reveals itself gradually, through design.

So the real subject of this question is not will it change but: at what point does this become a different project, and how is that decided? Is the scope formally revised, or absorbed? Are additional services defined in advance, or negotiated mid-construction when neither side has much leverage? Who tells you the number has moved, and when? Unclear procedures for scope growth and additional services create avoidable risk: fee disputes, a client surprised by a number they never budgeted for, and mismatched expectations about what work is still included. Work beyond the scope the agreement describes is typically handled as a change to that agreement rather than absorbed into it, and the alternative to settling how that works in advance is discovering it mid-build, with the design already committed. If an architect raises change procedures, additional services, and cost communication without being asked, that tells you something useful about how the practice anticipates these issues.

What does your fee include, and what doesn't it?

One fee number set against another tells you almost nothing, because the two rarely buy the same thing.

What matters is what the number is attached to: what's inside it, what's carved out, whether consultants and filings and redesign after a change and extended construction administration are covered if the schedule slips, and, above all, what triggers an additional-services charge. That last one is the direct line back to the previous question; the fee and the change-order clause are the same conversation seen from two sides. A lower fee attached to a narrower scope is not directly comparable with a higher fee for broader services. If those excluded services turn out to be required, they can reappear later as additional cost or as responsibility that still needs to be assigned, which is exactly what you want to see before comparing, not after. Compare what each fee assigns, not what each fee says.

Can I speak to your previous clients?

Yes, though the way to use the answer is not the obvious one.

Start with the fact that the clients an architect offers you are selected people who have agreed to speak. That creates a known selection effect without your having to guess their exact experience, and the job is to read with the effect in mind rather than pretend it isn't there. The question worth holding as you listen is why this reference was chosen, and how comparable that project actually is to yours.

It also helps to remember what a reference call actually is. The renovation may be several years behind the person you're calling; they've been living in the finished rooms, and their account will be shaped by time, memory, the final outcome, and their own priorities at the time. That doesn't make it unreliable. It means the useful questions aren't the ones that ask for a verdict. Ask what surprised them. When did they feel they were in good hands, and when didn't they. What was harder than they expected. How the architect

handled disagreement, how responsive they were, how they worked with the contractor, how the approvals went. And listen, underneath the answers, for whether this client's situation and expectations resemble yours, because a good match for someone with different priorities may not be one for you.

Two more things worth holding. A reference who reports that everything went smoothly may be describing a smooth project, or a project whose problems were resolved before they reached the client; a frictionless account is not by itself proof of a frictionless project. And you are not limited to the names you're handed. An independently identified former client, someone whose project on the firm's Houzz, Instagram, or Google profile resembles yours, can complement the architect's own references by reducing one source of selection bias. The courtesy there is to ask the architect whether an introduction is possible rather than contacting the person cold.

What is the architect asking you?

A conversation that runs in one direction is missing half its evidence.

An architect who will have to understand your project deeply in order to run it tends to start understanding it in the interview: how decisions get made in your household, what the real constraints and priorities are, what has to be true by when. A meeting in which the architect asks substantive questions gives you evidence about what the practice treats as material in judging project fit; a meeting with fewer of them gives you less of that evidence.

Read this carefully, though, because the signal is easy to misread. The absence of warm, personal questions in a first meeting is not a mark against an architect. A selection conversation is not the same as design discovery. The questions about how you live and what moves you usually come after there's an engagement to justify them, and their absence early on says little on its own. What's worth reading is not how much an architect wants the work, but what their questions reveal about how they assess whether to take it.

Illustration 4:
Assembling the Evidence

Every source answers one part of the question and no source answers all of it. The decision is what remains after they are weighed against each other.

What an interview still cannot tell you

Everything above helps, and none of it is enough on its own, which is not a reason for suspicion but a reason to understand what each piece of evidence is for.

An interview is a controlled setting, the way a first consultation with any professional is a controlled setting: everyone is presenting their best understanding of their own work. That isn't deception. It's the nature of the format, and it has limits the format can't cross. A good interview is evidence of a good interview; it is not evidence of execution. It won't tell you how an architect behaves in month four, when a decision is needed and they're on another job. Whether the drawings that looked complete hold up when a contractor tests them. Whether the cost discipline was real or a talking point. Whether the person who filled the room is the one who returns the call.

But the answer to that isn't to distrust everything. It's to understand that each kind of evidence establishes one thing, and only that thing. A portfolio documents the work a practice presents as representative. A reference gives one former client's retrospective account of a working relationship. A proposal defines the stated scope, roles, and responsibilities. An interview shows how an architect frames and discusses your project under interview conditions. Built work is evidence of physical outcomes; the contractors and former clients behind it can speak to aspects of delivery and

construction-phase performance an interview can't reach; and public records can corroborate specific filings, applications, approvals, dates, and, where the record names it, professional involvement, though not a complete regulatory history, an architect's full role on the project, or the quality of what was built. No single one of these decides the question, and none is meant to. They answer different parts of it, and the decision is what you get when you hold them together.

It's worth remembering, too, that many situations that feel exceptional to a homeowner undertaking a major renovation are familiar professional problems to an experienced architect and a competent contractor, part of the ordinary content of their work. This may be the largest and most personal investment you will make; for the team you hire, much of what arises is the job. The question was never whether difficulties will arrive. They will. It is whether the people you've chosen have the experience and the discipline to meet them, and whether the evidence you've gathered, taken together, gives you real reason to believe they do.

That is the actual work of choosing an architect: not collecting impressive answers, but assembling different kinds of evidence and judging whether they add up to fit for one specific project.

The Architect Registry evaluates architects for substantial residential projects in New York.
When the evidence supports a strong project fit, it recommends one architect. When it does not, it recommends none.

Sources

^[1]AIA Contract Documents, B101–2017 Standard Form of Agreement Between Owner and Architect and A201–2017 General Conditions of the Contract for Construction (construction-phase services and means-and-methods limitations). aiacontracts.com.

^[2]NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission, "Permits and Making Alterations." nyc.gov/site/lpc/about/permits-and-making-alterations.page.

Regulatory and professional-source information was reviewed September 7, 2026. Requirements and standard documents change. Obligations depend on the property, jurisdiction, participants, and agreements involved.