Strength is numbers, he adds. “One thing we’ve all found is that we share many of the same challenges,” he says. “As a group, we can discuss these challenges and collectively come up with solutions.”
One of the most significant of these challenges for the ARA: The public doesn’t understand what a registered architect — a person licensed by a state or states to practice architecture — does, and the difference between an architectural firm and a drafting service, Hann explains.
He believes that this type of group should probably have been put together 10 –15 years ago, when most architects did commercial work with an occasional residential project in the expanding Valley luxury home market. Since then, residential architecture has evolved its own demands and styles as well as levels of quality in design and building.
“The ARA helps identify those architects specializing in custom residential design — and helps to give us our own identity,” Hann says. “Like medicine, there are many areas of practice; ours is custom residential design.”
By creating the ARA, comprising residential architects, the members can help the public understand the unique demands of this type of architecture, giving potential clients an easy means of identifying which architect would be best for their project.
“Previously, potential clients would only have our individual Web sites as reference elements, and many could be overlooked,” Hann explains. “As a group, they can look at and experience many different aspects of design in one place and ultimately (hopefully) be able to decide what would be best for them.” As a result, the organization will benefit both architects and clients.
The extended recession and a lack of consumer knowledge have created a market in which qualified clients, who think they are well positioned, are not. “My first thought, when I first heard from Nick about the group, was ‘How could pulling a lot of the significant residential architects together benefit all of us?,’ Hutchison recalls.
Hutchison, a graduate of Arizona State University’s School of Architecture and principal of Scottsdale-based Urban Design Associates, reconsidered. “Because people are looking at cost more closely nowadays, they’re tending toward unqualified architects without experience — and they need more information going in to their projects to understand what their options might be at the onset,” he says.
Hutchison still would rather see a potential client contract with a qualified architect than with one who is not, lacking the knowledge or experience to do a professional job.
“With ARA, we’re offering the custom home-building public 15 names of qualified architects,” says Hutchison, who opened his firm approximately 30 years ago and has designed custom homes for two decades. “They all have different styles and they are all eminently qualified to create custom homes at the highest level,” he adds.
The ARA also produced its first publication in January, with biographies of each of the architects and high-quality images of some of their designed homes as well as ads from interior designers, landscape architects, builders and vendors to the homebuilding industry. Each of the members contacted assigned sponsors to purchase advertising in the book, whose next issue is due approximately Sept. 15.
