The house will get built either way
Did you ever hear of construction or renovation horror stories?! It seems everyone has at least heard of one!
What changes everything is how early the right questions are asked. Building a house or renovating is a technical, complex and expensive process. You dont want to realise this midway! You should know that there are three people involved:
The architect—looking at the house from the outside. Volumes, structure, regulations.
The contractor—focused on how it gets built. Costs and execution.
The interior designer—focused on how you actually live there. How it feels, how it functions, what features matter to you.
All three are essential. But they’re solving different problems. But who drives the process?
A design build firm (like Studio Andreea Franca) will have a different point of view from an architectural build firm or from a contracting firm because each one is coming from their unique angle on construction.
And that’s where things can get blurred. How do you start? Who takes the lead?
A bit like the French philosopher René Descartes once wrote - when something is too complex to solve - remove everything unnecessary until you’re left with what is actually true. So why are you doing this project?
Neither for shapes and volumes or materials.
Nor for beautiful budget spreadsheets. (although those are important too!)
But because you want to enjoy living there—once it’s all done.
Last month, I was brought into a project where the plans were already drawn. On paper, everything made sense. So what I did at this stage is to take the architectural plans and pull up the walls on the computer. I draw everything in 3D— so we could actually see the space.
In 3D, you see it immediately. You understand proportions. You test ideas. You catch things before they’re built. And that’s when we saw it. The kitchen was in the wrong place. Nothing was wrong technically. The architect had done their job.
The contractor was ready to build. But the house didn’t yet reflect how the client was going to live in it. They don’t cook much and they didn't entertain either. They cared about the view. They wanted to be connected to the outside. So we moved the kitchen. And that one decision changed everything—the flow, the experience, what you see when you walk in.
Because many of the most important things need to be built into the house from the beginning not as an after thought: Built-ins, kitchen layouts, bathroom configurations, lighting, storage. Details that shape daily life!
There’s no single right way to start a project. But when a project is led by how you want to live there, and when this is coordinated with the architecture and construction from the beginning - the house comes together in a very different way.
xx
Andreea