What to look for, what to ask, and the answers that should make you pause — written by a studio that would rather you chose well than chose us by default.
You are about to hand someone a significant amount of money and several years of your life, mostly on the strength of photographs. Portfolios are designed to be persuasive, so they are a poor basis for the decision on their own.
Here is what we would look at if we were hiring an architect.
Ask to see plans of a completed project, not renders of an unbuilt one. Plans reveal whether a practice thinks — how circulation works, whether the service areas were planned or left over, whether storage exists, whether rooms have more than one use. Beautiful photographs of a badly planned house are easy to produce.
Similar scale and similar budget matter more than similar style. Then ask about a project that went wrong, and listen to how the answer is framed. Every practice has one. A studio that cannot name a single difficult project is either very new or not being straight with you.
A fee quoted before anybody has understood the brief. Reluctance to put the scope in writing. A promise about an approval timeline, which no architect controls. Dismissiveness about budget — a studio that will not discuss money early will discuss it later, painfully. And a portfolio in which every project looks the same regardless of site or client, which usually means the practice has one idea and sells it repeatedly.
In India the title 'architect' is protected. A person practising as an architect must be registered with the Council of Architecture, and registration is verifiable. This is a two-minute check that many clients never do. Designers who are not registered architects may do excellent work, but they cannot sign the drawings that certain approvals require, and you should know that before you appoint.
An engagement letter should state the scope by stage, the fee and how it is billed, what is excluded, how revisions are handled, who owns the drawings, the site-visit schedule and how either side can exit. It protects you more than it protects the architect, and a practice that resists writing it down is telling you something.
