Questions We Are Asked Before Signing
The eight that come up on almost every first call, answered at the length we would answer them in the room. If yours is not here, the studio inbox is read every working morning and a question is never a nuisance.
What does a full commission cost?
Our packages run from 12,000 for a single room to 180,000 for a whole-house commission, and the number that matters is the one in your proposal rather than either end of that range. Fees are fixed at the point the scope is agreed, not billed hourly against it, so a slow month on our side is our problem and not an invoice you did not expect.
How long does a project take from first call to handover?
A single room is usually four to five months. A whole house is fourteen to twenty. Roughly half of that is lead time on millwork and stone we cannot compress, which is why the schedule you are given at stage one holds: it is built around the longest item, not around our availability.
Do you work outside your twenty studio cities?
Yes, and about a fifth of our work is remote. What changes is the site supervision — we appoint a local contract administrator and visit at three fixed points rather than weekly. What does not change is that a studio lead runs the project. See our international commissions page for how travel, time zones and contract language are handled.
Who owns the drawings when the project ends?
You own an unlimited licence to build, alter and maintain your own project from them, in perpetuity. We retain copyright in the drawings themselves, which is what lets us reuse a joinery detail on a later commission. The one thing the licence does not extend to is handing the set to another studio to build a second copy of your house.
Can we keep furniture we already own?
Almost always, and we would rather you did. Bring photographs and rough dimensions to the first meeting. A piece with some history in it does more for a room than anything we could specify new, and the palette is easier to build around an existing object than to retrofit one into.
What happens if a specified material is unavailable?
Every specified item carries a named fallback in the finish schedule, chosen at the same time as the original and by the same person. If both are unavailable we ask before anything is ordered. The one thing we do not accept is a substitution made on site because a supplier called it equivalent — see our trade enquiries page for what that word means in a catalogue.
Do you take on partial or single-room projects?
Yes. The Essential package exists for exactly this, and a single well-resolved room is a better outcome than a whole floor done thinly. What we do not take on is a project where the budget has already been spent everywhere else and the remainder is what is left over.
How do we start?
Email the studio with the rooms, the rough budget and when you would like to be living in it. That is enough for us to say whether we are the right practice for the work, which is the only useful outcome of a first conversation. If we are, the next step is a thirty-minute discovery call and a look at your floorplans.