Practicing a life of Principle-Based Architecture

In 2007, my 10-year-old business had just signed a 5-year lease on Atlanta's Peachtree Road with enough space for my partner and our wives' separate companies to continue growing. We thought we were an overnight success 10 years in the making. 14K a month split between 3 companies, all in the housing and office design industry; what could go wrong?

As I look back on those early days, I realize that our business was fueled by the fiat jet fueled housing run-up. Two couples, three businesses, and all personally guaranteed. We thought we were an overnight success, but little did we know that the housing market was about to take a drastic turn.

In 2008, I joined a Vistage CEO group, where I was tasked with presenting to the group on my approach to designing buildings for individuals. I saw an opportunity to analyze the patterns that produced good projects for happy clients, and I teamed up with a contractor buddy to work on a joint presentation. Our efforts yielded ten principles that produced the highest ROI beyond providing a primary place to live.

These principles were the foundation of our approach to architecture, and they were based on our experiences working with individuals on their custom house projects. We focused on listening to our clients, designing buildings that stood out while fitting in, creating lifetime homes, and making projects sustainable and viable.

As I reflect on our journey, I realize that the principles we developed were an interesting reflection of what was happening to our clients in the housing market of that time and how we as architects help our clients get through the process. Over time, we had to adapt and evolve to respond to changing conditions.

In 2010, we made changes to respond to a client environment where projects happened without banks. Clients spent paper on their projects, and construction loans were not available. What the subsequent buyers wanted when the house was sold was off the table. Remember being thankful our clients had cash to spend on projects in our survival predicament.

In hindsight, our clients are probably grateful as well for being able to convert paper into a hard asset. The principles evolved slowly until the COVID came in 2020. I was ready to hunker down and go to business survival mode like back in the crash, converting staff to contractors again and only paying for billable work.

But "your" government made PPP rain from the sky on our small business with employees. In addition, clients working from home who needed change or from their vacation property added gasoline to the fire. By 2022, inflation raged, described as transitory, to change the build cost from 1.2 million to a new price of 2.2 million for the new Intown infill homes. That is 83% inflation over 2 years, no matter what the CPI said.

The principles pivoted to respond: going fast to respond to inflation, managing the stuff to deal with supply chain problems, providing a viability budget before starting work to help clients understand the cost, and guiding our clients through the choppy waters of inflation.

We added a new principle about stewardship, which has become a cornerstone of our approach. We want to become architects for life for our completed projects and owners. We want to maintain relationships, observe results, and be trusted advisors as our projects age and clients' needs evolve.

Today, we are proud to say that our principles have evolved into 10 guiding principles that organize our approach to producing architecture asset architecture for the individual. We leverage the team of clients, contractors, vendors, and our time through our principle based process to produce architecture worthy of being an asset for our clients and families.

These 10 principles are:

1. Listen: Analyze and understand our client's goals, constraints, and opportunities to communicate our vision of what is possible.
2. Establish Viability: Before starting our project process, we will engage our client in a pre-project viability phase to diagnose and prescribe our solutions with a timeline and budget for client approval.
3. Be a Design Sherpa: Our process is the most important value we provide. Following our process milestones will lead new and experienced clients through the 1000’s of design decisions to evolve in the correct order at the proper time.
4. Design in Context: We believe context is the caldron of good architecture fits into its location both from the outside and inside out. Designing in context allows a building to stand out while fitting into the adjacent network of spaces around it.
5. Architecture is a team sport: We believe in custom teams for custom projects, collaborating with partners who care about our clients and believe in our process as much as we do.
6. Design for the individual: We do our most fulfilling work with clients who will live in or operate architecture explicitly created for their needs.
7. Investment iteration: We break down the design process into decision milestones, providing increasingly detailed pricing for initial ideas, building shell, and interior selections to empower clients to make informed decisions about the value they're willing to exchange for their desired architecture.
8. Create Asset Architecture: Design and execute projects that hold long-term value and provide a return on investment beyond the currency used build the project.
9. Be present: Designing and building stuff is an atypical and infrequent activity for our client. Help our clients enjoy the journey and results that could be life-changing (in a good way).
10. Stewardship—We want to Become architects for life for our completed projects and owners. We want to maintain relationships, observe results, and be trusted advisors as our projects age and clients' needs evolve.

We're an architect tribe that has refined our principles to design buildings that truly matter for the people that use them. Aspire to create hard asset architecture worth exchanging for the hardest money there is.

HODL on.