9 questions to ask a Houston architect before you sign, and the answers that should worry you

Before you sign with an architect in Houston, find out 4 things plainly: who will actually draw your house, what each phase of the fee covers, who engineers the foundation, and whether anyone from the firm will be on site once construction starts. Then ask which permit offices they have filed with, because in this metro that answer changes the schedule. A vague answer to any of these costs more later than a higher fee costs now.

What follows is the list I would put to any firm, in the order I would ask it, with the answer that should make you slow down.

Is the person I am meeting the one who will draw my house?

Ask it directly. Most first meetings are taken by a principal, and most houses are drawn by someone else.

That is not automatically a problem. A larger office with a project architect who has done 30 houses in the Memorial Villages can serve you well. The problem is not knowing. You spend 2 hours in the first meeting explaining how your household lives, and then the person who heard it hands a page of notes to someone who did not.

The answer that should worry you: "the team" with no name attached. Ask to meet the person who will run the drawings before you sign, and ask what happens if they leave the firm halfway through.

Are you a registered architect, and can I check it?

In Texas the title "architect" is protected. A registered architect has a number with the Texas Board of Architectural Examiners, and the registration can be looked up in about a minute. Do it. It is the one verification in residential construction here that the state actually does for you, since Texas does not license general contractors at all.

Here is the part people do not expect. Texas does not require a registered architect to design a single-family house. Building designers and drafters draw a large share of Houston's houses, legally, and some of them are very good.

So follow the licence question with a harder one: what does your registration change about what you will do for me? If the answer is nothing, you are paying for a title.

What does the fee cover, phase by phase?

Residential architecture normally runs in phases: schematic design, design development, construction documents, permitting, bidding, and construction administration. A proposal should say which of those you are buying and roughly how the fee splits between them.

Fees get structured 3 common ways here. A percentage of construction cost. A fixed fee. Hourly, sometimes with a cap. Each has a real weakness.

A percentage fee rises when the budget rises, which puts the architect on the wrong side of your cost problem, at least on paper. A fixed fee protects you only as far as the scope is written; everything outside it comes back as "additional services" at an hourly rate. Hourly is honest about effort and impossible to budget.

The answer that should worry you is a single number with no phase list under it. You cannot tell what was left out. Modern Acre Studio's breakdown of what it costs to design a custom home in Houston walks through where the money goes, which helps when reading anyone's proposal.

I would add one line to every contract: the number of revision rounds included in each phase. Most fee disputes turn out to be arguments about the fourth round of changes to a floor plan everyone thought was settled.

Who engineers the foundation, and is that in your fee?

On Houston's gumbo clay this is not a formality. The clay swells when it is wet and shrinks when it dries, and it moves houses. The regional default for new construction is a post-tension slab designed by a structural engineer working from a soils report for your lot, and for an addition the engineer also has to deal with the old foundation meeting the new one.

Some architects carry the structural engineer inside their fee. Many do not. Either is fine as long as you know which before you sign, because a soils report and an engineered foundation are not optional line items you can decide about later.

The answer that should worry you: "the builder handles the foundation." Sometimes the builder does bring an engineer. But it means the foundation is being designed after the house, by whoever wins the bid, and the architect is not the one checking it. Why the clay drives that is covered in more depth elsewhere on this site.

Ask the same question about mechanical design. In climate zone 2A an oversized air-conditioning unit short-cycles, never runs long enough to pull the humidity out, and leaves the house clammy at 74 degrees. Somebody should be running a Manual J load calculation, the industry method for sizing the system to the house. Find out whether that somebody is on the architect's team or left to the HVAC subcontractor.

Which permit offices have you filed with?

This one is specific to Houston and it matters more than it sounds.

The City of Houston, Bellaire, West University Place, the Memorial Villages and unincorporated Harris County all run separate permitting, with separate review habits and separate schedules. A firm that has filed 20 times with West U knows what that office kicks back. A firm filing there for the first time is guessing, and its guess will be optimistic. The same house on 4 different lots goes through 4 different processes.

The answer that should worry you: "permits are pretty much the same everywhere." They are not, and the first round of review comments will prove it on your schedule.

A firm with no history in your jurisdiction is not disqualified. Ask how they will find out what that office expects before they submit, not after.

Have you read my deed restrictions, and is the lot in a historic district?

Houston has no conventional zoning, so deed restrictions do most of the work zoning does elsewhere. They can set the building line, the height, the number of stories and sometimes the materials, and they are enforced privately by the neighbours and the civic association. Two lots on the same street can carry different ones.

If the lot is in one of the city's historic districts, the Heights and Woodland Heights among them, exterior work needs a Certificate of Appropriateness before you can pull a permit. That review shapes the design itself. Designing first and checking the district second is the most expensive order to do it in.

A good architect asks for your deed restrictions before the first sketch. The answer that should worry you is a sketch at the first meeting and no question about restrictions at all.

What happens if the bids come back over budget?

They often do. Ask before it happens, because the contract usually already answers it and most owners never read that clause.

Some firms will redesign at no charge if bids exceed a budget that was agreed in writing. Others bill the redesign hourly, which means you pay again to fix a number they helped set. Neither is unreasonable on its face, since construction prices move and the architect does not control the market. But you should know which one you signed.

Two follow-ups help. Will anyone put a cost figure on the design at the end of schematic design, when changing it is still cheap? And is that figure an estimate from a builder or the architect's own judgement? An early number is imperfect. It is still far better than learning the truth from 3 bids on a finished permit set. The cost calculator on this site gives honest ranges to test the first conversation against.

Will anyone from your firm be on site during construction?

Construction administration is the phase owners cut first to save money, and it is the one I would cut last.

It means site visits at set stages, answering the builder's questions against the drawings, and reviewing the builder's payment applications before you pay them. That last part is the protection. In a state where the person running your job holds no licence, an architect comparing each invoice to the actual progress on site is doing much of the checking a licensing board would do elsewhere.

Ask how many site visits are included, at what stages, and whether pay applications are reviewed or just forwarded. The answer that should worry you: "we are always available by phone." A phone call does not see that the window rough openings are 2 inches off.

Who owns the drawings if we part ways?

Under most standard architecture contracts the architect keeps the copyright, and you receive a license to use the drawings to build that house on that lot. That is normal and fair.

What you need to know is what happens if the relationship ends at design development. Can you take the drawings to another firm and finish them? Is there a fee to release them? A contract silent on this leaves you stuck with a half-designed house nobody else can legally complete.

The caveat

A firm can answer every one of these well and still be wrong for you. These questions screen for how a practice runs, not for whether you will like the house it draws or get along with the person drawing it for 18 months. Look at finished work you can visit, and talk to 2 owners who have lived in their houses through at least 1 Houston summer.

It also cuts the other way. A small practice may honestly tell you it cannot do weekly site visits in Katy from an office inside the Loop. That is not a bad answer. It is a true one, and a firm willing to say what it will not do is usually more reliable on what it will.

If you are still building the shortlist, the register lists residential practices across the Houston area with the jurisdictions they work in, which is a sensible place to start asking.