Making the most of a design effort

The relationship between a client and an architect or designer is dynamic, with influence flowing both ways.

At its best, the process is collaborative and produces spaces both parties are proud of. At its worst, it can lead to disappointment, strained relationships or unmet expectations.

More often, the outcome is a compromise between the owner’s vision and the designer’s convictions, ideally fulfilling the owner’s functional and aesthetic needs while incorporating professional creative input.

I’d like to believe that successful collaborations are far more common, but they don’t happen without a deliberate dropping of egos and a careful distillation of wants and needs. Mutual understanding, trust and clear communication must be present from the start.

Here are some common fault lines to recognize—and avoid.

Clients should define the desired experience. Let the design professional come up with the solution. Dramatic? Calm? Playful? The designer’s role is to give those feelings physical form. (vectorworks.net)

Insufficient project brief

Most clients have an imagined lifestyle before they understand the day-to-day patterns of their current way of living. They have difficulty articulating how they carry out their activities and what movements are associated with them.

Do they work from home? How many parking slots are needed? Do they order GrabFood often, or do they prefer to cook? Where do they keep their bedding at night?

Instead of addressing potential and current problems, the design solves an imagined lifestyle without first understanding their present behavior.

Something attractive on an IG post may not necessarily work for your space. Proportion, lighting, and scale demand a careful study of forms in order to be aesthetically pleasing. (instagram)

Photo-basing and trend-fitting

Images pulled from Instagram, TikTok or Pinterest may be impressive, but do they suit your needs?

Social media allows people to dream without considering the actual space available. Instead of deriving a design from the parameters of a space, an app-inspired design is often forced upon it—a true violation of the design process.

Aesthetics should suit the space and create an experience unique to its context. Other considerations, such as climate and maintenance, should also factor into its functionality.

The Barcelona Chair was designed for the 1929 International Exposition—that’s 97 years ago! And yet, this chair remains relevant and iconic. (centuryhouseinc.com)

Underestimating maintenance, climate

Our warm tropical humidity, long rainy season, monsoon flooding and harsh summers can create havoc in the materials and moving parts of a space, while driving up airconditioning and electrical loads. These are often ignored until problems arise a year or two later.

Rather than a thorough investigation of possible issues and problems, unrealistic requirements are pushed and left to wishful thinking until reality hits and materials and finishes fail.

Structures that are daring and demand more from the engineering work are best conceptualized integrating all disciplines early on in the design phase. (new wave architecture)

Confusing “expensive” with “good”

Cost does not equate to quality. A desire for marble everywhere, imported everything and excessive layering, with little consideration for proportion, color, light and flow, can have disastrous outcomes.

As a client, appreciate the intention and trust that your design professional understands how “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” The math in design adds up differently.

Treating architects, designers as decorators, not problem-solvers

Some clients engage design professionals at the onset of a project without a proper brief, seeing their architect or designer as someone who will execute or embellish an idea rather than solve a problem.

Others arrive with a preconceived “solution,” requiring the design professional to step back, unpack the assumptions behind it, identify the real problem and propose a more effective response.

Still, others bring architects and designers only at a later stage, missing the opportunity to resolve structural, spatial, operational or budgetary issues when they are far easier and less costly to address.

In value engineering exercises, surface finishes become the sacrificial lambs of cos-cutting. In this situation what is often sacrifice is not so much aesthetics, but quality.

Value-engineering that guts the design intent

Cost-cutting may be necessary, but done at the wrong time or in the wrong places, it can damage the qualities that give design its value.

Value engineering should happen early, when systems, layouts and specifications can still be evaluated as a whole rather than through piecemeal substitutions. Priorities should be based on function, durability, user experience and long-term performance.

The goal is not simply to reduce costs, but also to preserve the design value and experience.

Convey your feelings, not just preferences

Designing a space is a process of translation, not merely execution.

Don’t prescribe solutions. Instead, describe how you want the space to feel. Calm? Welcoming? Intimate? Energizing? Give your architect or designer the opportunity to translate those emotions through layout, light, proportion, materials, color and movement.

Clients know how they want to live, while design professionals are trained to turn those wishes into supportive environments.

When Frank Lloyd Wright was commissioned to design Fallingwater, he was supposed to design a house that overlooked the waterfall. But Wright had a different idea: “No—you’ll live with the waterfall.” So many years later, Fallingwater remains one of the world’s greatest homes. (archdaily.com)

Frame expectations around durability, adaptability

Resist the temptation to chase trends that may feel dated in just a few years.

Invest instead in designs that age gracefully—spaces that are timeless, adaptable and capable of evolving with changing needs and lifestyles. Timelessness is not the absence of style, but the ability of a design to remain relevant long after trends have come and gone.

Give your design professional room to be honest

A good architect or designer is not there to validate your ideas, but to challenge them when necessary.

Honest advice should always be offered in the interest of a better outcome. The most valuable design professionals are willing to say, “That may not work for you” or “That is not the solution to our problem,” and clients benefit most when they are willing to listen.

Success is when both parties’ best thoughts come together

Constructive disagreement, grounded in experience and expertise, is often where the strongest design ideas begin. While clients are experts in how they live, work and experience the world, architects and designers are experts in shaping spaces that support experiences.

The best projects emerge when personal insights and professional judgment support, rather than compete with, one another.

The author is a principal architect of Asuncion-Berenguer Inc., a full-service architectural and interior design firm recognized for designing experiences and spaces that elevate everyday living through thoughtfully crafted environments. Contact her through isabel@abi.ph or @isabelbasuncion