How I work

A first meeting you don’t pay for, two or three schemes to choose from, working drawings with everything written into them, and a site I am on myself. Below is how it goes, from the first visit to the keys, with the real timings of a job just finished.

The first meeting

The first meeting costs nothing and commits you to nothing. We meet, we look at the place, we work out whether there is a project in it. Sometimes we work out that there isn’t, and that is useful to know too.

Bring whatever you have: a floor plan is fine, and if you haven’t got one, a page from the land registry will do. If you haven’t even got that, come anyway: the survey is my problem.

The survey

If a reliable survey already exists I use it; I don’t redo it on principle. But I prefer to go and check it myself, because a wrong measurement doesn’t show on the drawing: it shows on site, when the furniture won’t fit.

Two or three schemes, not one

The survey doesn’t produce a project: it produces two or three. They are different routes through the same place, and we look at them together until it is clear which one is yours. On the last flat it took two meetings over two and a half weeks.

The decision here is yours. My job is to put real choices in front of you, not a single proposal to approve.

The working drawings

Then the working drawings get made, and everything is written into them, listed in full, item by item. My working drawings speak for themselves: that is the point of the whole job.

They do two things. The builder prices a complete drawing instead of an idea, and nothing gets improvised on site.

The planning application

It depends on the local authority and on what is being touched: a flat, a shop, an office, a farmhouse or a ruin are not the same application. Sometimes I file it myself; sometimes I lean on someone who really knows that particular authority, because you need them afterwards too, for the variations that come up once the work is open. For large jobs I have a practice I can count on.

The builder

If you already have a builder you trust, you introduce them and we work with them: it has happened often, and it has often gone very well.

If you haven’t, I will introduce you to two. They price the bill of quantities from the same drawings, so the two figures you end up holding are genuinely comparable, and not two quotations describing two different jobs.

On site

On most of the jobs I have done I have held site supervision myself. If you would rather hand the applications and that role to someone else, that is no problem for me: what does not change is that I am on site, and often.

Surprises are avoided beforehand. A good builder checks and re-checks the work before handing over a quotation: what turns up elsewhere once the walls are open has almost always been seen already.

And if you change your mind once the work has started, we change it: that is not a problem. The timings change, in proportion to what you ask for. I would rather tell you now than be asked later.

At the end

On handover you receive all the certifications, mine and the builder’s. Where there is one, the photographic record of the site as well: from the first day to the finished rooms.

From the first visit to the first hammer blow: nine weeks. Then six months on site.

After those six months the house waited for the furniture, which had not yet been chosen: that part does not depend on the site, it depends on you.

A farmhouse, a ruin or a change of use stretch the first part above all, the applications: that is where time is gained or lost, not on site.

What it costs

You won’t find a price list here, and it is not to be secretive. It is that a figure given before seeing the place is not a price: it is a number pulled out of the air.

How it is made up, though, I will gladly tell you. The fee is built from things that can be counted: the study drawings and the working drawings, the hours of site visits and supervision, the bill of quantities, the consultations when we choose a material, a finish or a piece of furniture together. When an outside consultant is needed — for an application, for the structure, for the services — I find them and we agree together what they are to do, but you agree their fee directly with them: it does not pass through mine. You know about it before we start, not at the end.

What it comes to in total depends on how large the job is and on how much of me you want in it. First we get to know each other, then we work out the fee together: in that order.

Where I work

The studio is in Milan, in via dell’Annunciata. But I work throughout Italy: I have finished sites on Lake Como, in Sardinia, in Sicily and in Tuscany. Outside Milan I look for builders locally, and for materials too: they save on transport and they age better, because they are already from there.