Someone types “architects near me” into a search bar and expects the internet to deliver certainty. Instead it delivers volume: headshots, glossy renders, award badges, reassuring slogans. It isn’t wrong. It’s just incomplete.

Architecture doesn’t reveal itself at thumbnail size. A building isn’t a product you unwrap. It is a long conversation—with your site, your budget, your family or your tenants, your city, and your future self. The right architect, in my experience, isn’t the one with the loudest portfolio. It’s the one who can lead that conversation with clarity— and stay honest when the trade-offs arrive.

Before you look outward, ask one inward question: what are you really building?

Most clients arrive with a list. That’s natural: rooms, square feet, parking, a façade reference saved from somewhere. But lists create buildings that behave like lists— assembled, not understood.

So I ask for a sentence, not a spreadsheet.

Are you building a home that quietly absorbs everyday life—noise, privacy, ageing parents, children who will grow up, mornings that need calm and nights that need quiet? Or are you building a home that performs as a symbol?

Are you building a commercial space that must be maximally efficient? Or one that must express culture through the experience of moving through it—before branding even arrives?

This distinction is not “creative.” It is operational. It decides where you spend, where you compromise, and what you will regret.

(And this is where project appointments often go wrong. If you want the clearest primer on how residential and commercial projects differ in temperament and constraints, read Issue 2 next. It names the pressures before you choose a person to manage them.)

How do you read a portfolio without being seduced by it?

Portfolios are necessary. They are also theatre.

A polished photograph doesn’t show the compromises, the contractor decisions, the structural negotiations, or the service shafts that arrived with their own demands. It doesn’t show the moment when the project stopped being an image and started becoming a site.

So ask for the story, not the slideshow: What was difficult about this project? What changed between concept and execution—and why? What did you push back on? What would you do differently now?

A serious architect answers these with candour. If everything sounds effortless, you are hearing marketing, not practice.

What should the first meeting feel like if it’s going to work?

You don’t need an architect who agrees with you. You need one who can disagree well.

The best early meetings are diagnostic. I’m listening for what you aren’t saying: the anxiety about cost overruns, the fear of maintenance, the desire for openness without noise, the need for privacy without isolation. A good architect doesn’t inflate your brief. They sharpen it.

A simple test: do you leave feeling understood, and also more precise about what you want?

What exactly are you paying for when you hire an architect?

Many people think architects “make drawings.” Drawings are the residue of thinking. What you are buying is judgment: sequencing decisions, coordinating consultants, resolving site realities, and protecting intent without being precious.

Ask what is included: planning and concept; working drawings with buildable detail; structural and MEP coordination (the unglamorous backbone); contractor alignment and tender support; site involvement—clarifications, milestone checks, quality discipline.

Commercial projects, especially, punish vagueness. If your architect cannot describe the process, your site will.

Why does “low fee” often become expensive?

There is a common tragedy in building: money saved in the wrong place, and then spent again undoing it.

A mature architect talks about budget in grown-up terms—priorities, phasing, lifecycle, and what not to waste money on. They also tell you when the brief and the budget don’t match, without theatre.

Compare not only fees, but deliverables and accountability. A cheaper appointment can become very costly when drawings are incomplete and site decisions happen in panic.

What’s the one thing you should do before you decide?

Visit built work. Walk it like a critic, not a customer.

Look at junctions, drainage, hardware, waterproofing, the smell of dampness (or its absence), how light behaves across the day. Ask the client how the architect behaved during construction—and after handover.

Photographs lie politely. Buildings tell the truth.

What does a good architect actually promise?

Not perfection. Stewardship.

Architecture is a thousand decisions made under constraints. The right architect can hold ambition in one hand and reality in the other—and still produce something calm, coherent, and deeply fit for purpose.

In the end, you are not hiring a style. You are hiring a way of seeing.

(And in the next issue, I’ll name how the “way of seeing” must change when the project is a home versus a commercial system.)