Floor plan single-family house, 2 full floors, approx. 170 sqm, slight hillside location

Further response gladly during the day, just quickly on this topic:

If you already bring a quota of competence and taste, references are certainly a very good clue. You can research a bit of half-knowledge on the internet, but taste only develops very slowly (or it’s just me). There you can maybe just distinguish the solid single-family house workhorse from the BDA patissier. Sure, if it has to be exactly a modern half-timbered house, then it would be interesting whether such a thing has been built before. But with a normal single-family house: with three gable house, walkway or hip roof... can you only trust an architect with that if they have references for it?

When I speak of references regarding architects, I never mean the question of how many design awards they have already been nominated for. Rather a kind of satisfaction index in terms of budget adherence and accuracy of cost estimates.
And I leave my own taste background out of the architect search for the simple reason that my clients very rarely have the same aesthetic preferences as I do. "The worm doesn’t have to taste good to the angler" ;-)

Whether the great reference house came about through the professionally proper procedure mentioned above or through iterative trial and error until the client gave up is not something you can tell by looking at the house (at least I couldn't). Of course, one can ask how the architect plans to proceed...

Exactly the latter is the "right" method

... but then you quickly fall into that interview routine known from job interviews (which are only conditionally meaningful anyway)

No, please no castings or assessment centers or ...

but the firm was still a hot candidate in terms of fit and under different acquisition/fee conditions it could still have worked out.

... which frankly sounds to me very much like you proceeded in an Excel spreadsheet manner and "matched the architect as your sweetheart" *scratches head*

considering all the botched cost estimates you hear about, it wouldn’t be bad if the architect can answer well the question about the number of piano tuners in Chicago).[ /QUOTE] I wouldn’t recommend looking for a quiz champion either. [QUOTE="thangorodrim, post: 649392, member: 59548"]if you already commission performance phases 1-2, you should have already met and with that the costs can be kept within limits, even if every candidate asks for the same money.

Of course there is also the commission for "Module A" only after deciding on an architect and it is paid; invoiced according to HOAI it accounts for 9/98 of the total fee. And candidates from the trial-and-error faction are already filtered out by this as they do not even offer that. How you can recognize the biggest " warns" good-for-nothings by the fact that they only offer the scope of services performance phases 1 to 4 (because they avoid the experience-requiring and serious work-meaning phases like the devil avoids holy water).