A good architect is not difficult to find. A good architect for your project, on your site, working with your budget and at the pace you can afford to move — that is harder. Most of the work of choosing well happens before you sign anything, in a small number of conversations that reveal whether a practice is the right shape for what you want to build.
The portfolio is the easy part
Every practice has a website. The portfolio is the first thing most clients look at, and it is also the least informative. What a studio has built tells you what they have been hired to build, not what they are capable of building. The more useful exercise is to look at three or four completed projects and ask: do these buildings share a sensibility? Is there a quietness across them, or a similar way of treating materials, light, the threshold between inside and outside? You are not looking for a style to copy. You are looking for evidence that the studio has a way of seeing.
The first conversation is the test
If a studio is the right fit, you will feel it in the first call. Not because they will agree with everything you say — a good architect will gently push back on parts of the brief in the first half hour — but because the conversation will feel two-sided. You will be asked about the site, about how you live or work, about budget and timeline, about why now. You will leave the call feeling like the practice has heard the project, not pitched themselves at it.
What you want to avoid is the opposite: a meeting that becomes a presentation, with slides, awards, and a fee structure shown before anyone has asked you what you are trying to build.
Scale, and the question of attention
Some practices are large, with multiple project teams and a principal who appears at the first meeting and the opening party. Others are small, where the same architect who drew the concept will be on site during construction. Neither is better. But the difference matters, and it should be named openly.
If you want close attention from a known voice across every phase, a smaller studio is usually the right answer. If you want the resources of a larger team — interior design, landscape, branding, all in one building — a bigger practice will serve you better. Ask, in the first meeting, who will be doing the work after the contract is signed. The answer should be specific.
References worth asking for
If you ask for client references — and you should — ask for them from a project that did not go perfectly. Every project has a moment that is hard, and how an architect handles that moment is the most useful thing a previous client can tell you. A glowing reference from a project that ran on time and on budget tells you almost nothing. A measured reference from a project that lost three months at council, and how it was handled, tells you everything.
It is also worth asking the builder, if you can, who they have worked with. Builders have a clear-eyed view of which architects document well, who answers calls during construction, and who disappears once the design is approved.
The things that matter less than you think
A few things tend to weigh heavily in client decisions that, in our experience, are not worth what they cost in the choice.
Awards are pleasant; they are not predictive. A practice with no awards and ten finished houses you would happily live in is a better choice than a practice with a wall of plaques and three.
Location matters less than people think. Travel is a small line in a project budget. We work across Australia and New Zealand from a studio in Byron Bay, and the studio's geography has never been the constraint a client expected it to be.
Fee is the last thing to weigh, not the first. A cheaper architect on a poorly-suited project is not a saving. A more expensive one on the right project usually pays for the fee difference in the first round of cost estimates.
What it comes down to
After enough first conversations, the choice tends to make itself. The right practice is the one whose questions feel adjacent to your own — the one whose way of looking at the site overlaps with how you already see it, even before any drawing is made. That overlap, more than any portfolio or fee structure, is what you are choosing.