Five stages, each one priced
What it costs, stage by stage
Nothing here is “on application”. You can read the whole fee before you email us, and you can stop after any stage and keep what you paid for.
Wallace Street Rooms · hall, strip-outS 2° E11:40
01 to 05
Stage fees are fixed. Construction-stage work is charged as a percentage because we cannot know the build cost until the tenders are in.
- 01$4,2002 weeks
Feasibility note
One site visit, a measured look at the zoning and the ground, and three pages telling you what the lot will take and roughly what it will cost. Two weeks. If the answer is “do not buy this lot”, we say it here.
- 02$18,5006–9 weeks
Scheme design
Hand drawings at 1:50, a card model, and a visit to a finished house with the same orientation as yours. Two rounds of changes are included; a third is $1,400. Six to nine weeks depending on how often you can meet.
Townsite Schoolhouse · hallE09:05 - 03$26,00011 weeks
Permit set
Everything the city needs, plus the structural and energy consultants coordinated and paid out of our fee. Eleven weeks from instruction to submission. The city then takes as long as the city takes — fourteen weeks last year, nineteen on a heritage lot.
- 04$19,8007 weeks
Tender and joinery package
Three builders off a list of nine, a line-by-line comparison in one spreadsheet, and the joinery drawn at 1:5 so nobody is guessing. On six of our eight finished houses the middle tender won.
Brechin Point House · livingN 58° W16:15 - 056.5%build length
On site
Weekly visits, every instruction in writing, valuations certified monthly, and the snag list walked twice. Charged at 6.5% of construction cost, invoiced monthly against progress, not against time.
Brechin Point House · landingS 70° W17:30
Milton Street Flat · handover dayS 8° W09:55
Inside the fee
- Structural and energy consultants, coordinated and paid
- Every drawing, including the 1:5 joinery details
- The card model, which you keep
- Two rounds of changes at scheme stage
- The finished-house visit and the photographs afterwards
Outside it
- City permit and development fees, paid by you directly
- Survey, geotechnical and arborist reports
- Anything a heritage panel asks for after submission
- A third round of scheme changes — $1,400
- Furniture, which we will advise on for nothing
The three that go wrong
Where projects actually slip
Three numbers we keep and publish. They are the ones that decide whether a house is finished in the year we said it would be, and none of them are flattering all of the time.
Measured across eight finished houses2020–202508
Average 14 weeks at the city; 19 on a heritage lot.
The permit queue is the one thing we cannot shorten. What we can do is submit something that does not come back: in the last four years, six of our eight submissions were approved without a request for further information. The two that came back were both about rainwater, both on the same street.
“They sent the tender comparison as one page with the differences highlighted and a note saying which of the three they would choose and why. We had been warned architects never do that.”
Gavin Oyelaran · Jingle Pot Longhouse · client, 2022–2023
Next feasibility slotFront Streetin 3 weeks
Stage 01 is $4,200 and takes a fortnight
Send the lot address and one photograph taken from the road. We will tell you within two working days whether there is anything here worth paying us for.