A single point of responsibility.
Design and build gives our clients one point of responsibility from first concept through to final handover. We bring design, cost and construction together at the earliest stage, removing the gaps where risk, delay and dispute usually appear.
For clients who want certainty rather than co-ordination, it is the most efficient route to a finished building: one contract, one team, and one party accountable for the outcome.
We can take a scheme from a blank site and a brief, or step in and take design responsibility for an existing planning consent.
Certainty designed in from the start.
We involve our construction team while the design is still forming, testing buildability, lead-in times and cost as decisions are made rather than after they are fixed. Problems that would surface during construction are resolved on the drawing board, where they are cheap to solve.
The result is fewer surprises: a design that can actually be built, at the price agreed, in the time agreed — with one team answerable for all three.
Value engineering that protects the design.
Value engineering should sharpen a scheme, not strip it. We look for savings in sequence, specification and buildability first — protecting the elements that give a building its quality and its owner their return.
Where a budget genuinely needs to come down, we set out the options and their consequences clearly so the client makes an informed decision. We would rather have a difficult conversation early than deliver a disappointing building on time.
Better decisions, earlier.
Design and build is the ideal route to a genuinely sustainable building, because the people who will construct it are in the room when it is designed. Fabric performance, material choice and waste reduction are considered while they still cost nothing to change.
We work with our consultants and supply chain to specify responsibly sourced materials, reduce embodied carbon where practical, and retain existing structure and fabric wherever it makes sense to do so.
What a design and build appointment covers.
How we work with your team.
Taking design responsibility does not mean taking over. We work alongside client-side project managers, consultants and funders with the same transparency we would want ourselves.
- —Open-book cost reporting where clients want it.
- —Design decisions recorded with their cost and programme consequences.
- —Early warning of risk rather than late notification of change.
- —Coordination with client-appointed consultants and monitoring surveyors.
- —A single named director accountable for the whole appointment.
- —Full handover documentation and a clear defects process.
Why clients choose design and build.
One conversation, start to finish.
Most construction disputes begin in the space between the designer and the builder. Design and build closes that space.
Our clients get one team to brief, one programme to track, one cost to manage and one party responsible for the finished building — which is usually all they wanted in the first place.
To give our clients a single trusted partner — accountable for design, cost, programme and the building itself.