Most arguments between architects and clients are about information, not design. So we stopped running projects on chat threads.
Most arguments between architects and clients are not about design. They are about information: a drawing someone did not see, a decision nobody wrote down, a cost that moved without a conversation. We used to run projects the way most studios do, with email threads, chat groups and a shared drive that only one person understood. Two years ago we stopped, and built our own client studio instead.
One place for everything
Every project in the studio has a dashboard. It shows the phase the project is in, from concept through schematic design, design development and construction documents to handover, and what is in progress and in review at that moment. Below it sit the drawings, the 3D models, the material schedules, the meeting minutes, the site photographs and the approvals, each version dated and each decision attributed. When a client asks what the kitchen counter was changed to and when, the answer is one search away, not one phone call.
Meetings that leave a trace
Every meeting is scheduled from the studio's calendar, and every meeting produces minutes that list decisions, open questions and who owns them. Clients can add a comment to a drawing at eleven at night from another country, and the project architect sees it in the morning with the drawing attached. Nothing gets lost in a chat scroll.
Why it matters to us
It makes us better. When every decision is visible, you make fewer casual ones. When the cost plan is on the same screen as the drawings, nobody is surprised at tender. And when a client can see that the structural drawings were issued on a Tuesday, the conversation about why the site is waiting moves from suspicion to logistics.
What it is not
It is not a replacement for sitting at a table with samples, or for walking a site together. Those remain the best hours of any project. The studio exists so that those hours are spent on the house, not on finding the last version of the plan.
If we are working together, you will get your login on the first day. If we are not yet, the process page explains how a project moves through it.