How We Evaluate

Most of what determines whether a residential project succeeds or fails is not visible at the point of hiring. A portfolio is visible. How an architect works once the project is underway — and whether their sensibility is actually theirs, or borrowed for the occasion — is not.

That is what we evaluate.

We speak to past clients

Not the references an architect provides — those are curated. We identify former clients independently and ask how the project actually went: not whether they liked the finished space, but what the process was like. How problems were handled. Whether the architect was reachable. Whether the budget held or drifted, and whether they saw it coming.

The contractors who built an architect's projects know things the clients don't

— how the drawings arrive, whether details are resolved or left to the field, how the architect responds when coordination breaks down, whether they make the job harder or easier. A contractor who has built three projects with the same architect can say in ten minutes what a client won't know for a year.

A body of work shows whether an architect has a point of view of their own, or borrows one to suit the moment.

Whether the work is the architect's or the client's, whether it repeats a formula or answers a real problem. And whether it would hold up under the constraints of this project rather than the ones it was made under.

How an architect treats what they're given matters as much as what they produce.

Some shape the project around the client; others reshape the client to fit the work they already wanted to make. Whether an architect hears what a client cannot put into words, and how they respond when a client wants something they would not have chosen — whether they can hold a position that's worth holding, and let one go when it isn't. And we pay attention to who an architect is designing for: the people who will live in the rooms, or the picture taken once they've gone.

Permit histories and DOB filings are public record, and almost no one reads them. They are free, and they are searchable.

Filing patterns, amendment frequency, violations, certificate-of-occupancy timelines — these show how a practice manages the regulatory side of a project. An architect who files cleanly and closes out on schedule operates differently from one who doesn't, and the difference surfaces in the timeline, and in problems that were avoidable.

Who runs the project once it is underway is rarely who sits across the table at the first meeting.

Whether the people who actually carry it have done it before, and whether their judgment matches the person who won the work, is its own question.

Money is the other thing a meeting won't show.

Whether an architect treats cost as their own discipline, or as something to deal with when the contractor's numbers arrive, decides where the surprises live.

The evaluation doesn't begin from scratch each time; we already know the landscape. When a project comes to us, we weigh the architects plausible for it against everything above. This means talking to people, cross-referencing what we hear, and following up where things don't align. It is not algorithmic. It is not a scoring system. It is judgment, informed by evidence.

The outcome is a single recommendation: the architect right for that project, that client, and that set of constraints. Sometimes the outcome is no recommendation. If the evaluation doesn't produce a clear answer, we say so rather than force a fit.

Architects do not apply, and there is no roster or fixed list. A recommendation cannot be bought. The evaluation is independent. The recommendation is ours.

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