Design Review Services

Get reassurance that you’re on the right track with your home design so that you can move forward with your project with confidence.  Turn your good design into a GREAT design that you absolutely love with a design review by a licensed residential architect.

We’ll review your drawings, point out areas of concern, and provide suggestions for how to improve the design. Our design review is the perfect opportunity to fall in love with your design AND feel more confident that you’re getting exactly what you want – whether the plans were drawn by you, a builder, another designer, or a stock plan from a book or online.

Get Started With a Design Review!

The Design Review Process

Step 1: Engage

This is our chance to gather initial information about you and your project (including any current design drawings), remit design fees, and kickoff the design review process.

Step 2: Learn

We’ll have a discovery call to discuss your project in more detail. We’ll discuss what is working and not working, what you like and dislike, and how we can focus our efforts to help you move forward with your design. This is where we learn what you’re ultimately trying to achieve (your goals, needs, and wants) so that we understand what would make you feel more confident about your design.

Step 3: Review

We’ll review your design drawings with a focus on areas of most concern to you.  This may include analysis of the floor plan layout, room sizes, solar orientation, circulation and flow through spaces, room relationships, materials, window layout, site, budget, and building form to find opportunities to improve the design.

Step 4: Present

We conclude the Design Review process by sharing our observations and ideas with you in easy to understand visuals. This may be loose sketches, inspirational imagery, or 3D perspectives – whatever is necessary to convey our observations and help you move forward with your design.

Typical Design Reviews are $700.00 USD.

Reviews involving more design assistance, guidance, or drawing time may require an additional fee.

Recent Design Reviews

Recent Design Reviews can be found on our OPEN DOOR platform. You can find them here. 

Black Bear Design Review - before & after
Behind the Design Review - floor plan improvements
Tioga Design Review elevation studies
YRa+d Architectural Design Review
Sydney House Design Review
Tioga House Design Review
Black Bear Design Review - shading study
M Squared House Design Review

What Clients Are Saying…

We’re building a house in the mountains but have been really struggling with our very traditional contractor who wanted very much to build a fine home for us but who wanted to give it plenty of “mountain accents,” which would have made it look like every other home in our area. Trying to define our own style, a modern, minimalist design with a hint of the Blue Ridge in it, we continued to get pushback from our contractor and were, frankly, losing confidence that we were headed in the right direction. Reading blog after blog and scouring websites to try and find someone who understood our desire to merge two (and a half) design styles, we discovered Yvonne. And she understood exactly what we were attempting.

After talking to her and exchanging several emails, our blueprints, photos of our site, pictures of the homes that inspired us and exchanging the “whys” about our dream home, Yvonne made multiple tweaks to our drawings – and a pretty substantial suggestion on materials – and delivered a design that immediately landed with both of us. A couple of emails and a quick phone conversation later and we had a plan that we could get behind 100%. The home is almost finished, it’s coming out exactly as we had hoped and we expect to move to the mountains before the end of summer.

Describing your dream home can be tough – sometimes because it’s there – on the edge of your vision – but not really defined enough to truly verbalize it. What Yvonne really did was gradually tease out what we hadn’t been able to do by ourselves. She added color and a much sharper focus to the vision we had and we are, frankly, stunned.

If we have any regrets, it’s that we didn’t start working with her at the very beginning of the process… I suspect we’d have had a lot fewer discussions with our contractor and a much smoother plan to follow. Thanks, Yvonne, for helping us realize our dream!

Jim & Karen O., North Carolina

When we first reached out to Yvonne, we were in the process of designing our home with exactly zero experience designing homes. We were looking for a confidence boost in our plans which we had been painstakingly working on for months.

Working with Yvonne was a seamless process. She really listened to our concerns and focused her time and energy on not only what we wanted, but also what we needed. Her thoughts were well organized and easy to understand. She provided multiple solutions for our concerns and noticed a few other things that we hadn’t considered (right down to the location of light switches).

The time and effort that Yvonne put into our review surpassed our expectations. Her delivery was efficient, as we were able to solely communicate via email which worked beautifully.

Yvonne is encouraging and approachable. At no time did we feel our questions or comments were trivial. At the end of this experience, we were confident in our design and ready to move forward with our project. We can’t thank Yvonne enough for going above and beyond and we’re very happy that we decided to work with her. Really, the experience couldn’t have been better.

Jeff & Amy H., Ontario, Canada

I was quite hesitant to engage with Yvonne and her team at first having never met them, and no face to face communication. We had been developing a floor plan for over a year but were unable to incorporate some aspects we wanted. So after reading the blogs, website, emails, and articles from YR Architecture + Design, I decided to ask for help.

WOW, was that money well spent! Yvonne personally engaged with us, helping work out the details and in some ways not so minor changes so we could incorporate the features that are important to us. Yvonne helped us cut out non-living space like hallways, increasing bedroom and living area sizes, create a much larger pantry, and the entrance from the garage (mudroom) is much larger, has a smoother transition, and will make for a much easier entry to the home. She helped walk through the pro’s and con’s matching dormers to the lower level windows on being able to make the floor plan work as intended, just the understanding and clarity she and her team brought to the conversation was worth the cost.

My biggest fear, communicating via email was quickly dismissed, our communication was easy, quick, transparent, and worked great. My second biggest fear, quality of the work for the money spent was alleviated with the first communications. I am confident I received as good, if not better, service, input, and advice as if I had hustled all over town, going back and forth to a local architect’s office. Having the luxury of time management, being able to correspond on my very hectic schedule, was a massive added benefit. I own a large CPA firm. My time is valuable and limited. Being able to communicate after hours, not having to take time out of my daily routine to communicate with an architect was a blessing. Going forward I will engage Yvonne and her team on any significant building project, and recommend them highly to anyone needing their services.

Dean O., Kentucky

Before working with Yvonne, we had a basic floor plan for our future home that we came up with ourselves. We knew we weren’t skilled in design and weren’t entirely confident in our ideas and layout.

We asked Yvonne and her team to review our floor plan and window wall layout for ways to improve them. Initially, we were hesitant to work with Yvonne because we didn’t know her before our online meeting. But, we could tell she was passionate about helping people improve their lives through good design and genuinely wanted to help us.

Having Yvonne bless the basic design concept gave us a lot more confidence in our project. Her ideas and suggestions to improve the layout and flow added value and made the plan much better in the end. When we had comments or questions about the layout, she listened to our thoughts, answered our questions with additional suggestions, and communicated with us very well. She was extremely knowledgeable and explained things to us in a way that we, as non-designers, could easily understand. We would definitely work with Yvonne again and recommend her and her team to anyone looking for help with their home design.

Michael L., North Carolina

We’re using a builder & his architect to help us design and build our dream home, but I contacted Yvonne to look over our design because I wanted to make sure we were utilizing the spaces well and orienting the rooms for lighting and heat. We weren’t IN LOVE with the design until Yvonne looked at our design and rectified some concerns we had.

She reviewed our floor plans and I loved her suggestions! She was thorough & so prompt. She’s honestly brilliant & was able to suggest changes that solved all of our concerns. One of her suggestions was flipping the master suite with another bedroom- something no one else thought of!

I’ll definitely be incorporating her ideas into the design. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend her services to anyone & will definitely call upon her expertise if we decide to build again. Thanks a million, Yvonne!

Aneta K., Sydney, Australia

FAQs

A Design Review is right for you if:

  • You have sketches/drawings of your project and want an expert opinion on your design
  • You don’t know what you don’t know so having an honest review of your design will give you the added reassurance you’re on the right track
  • You want to feel confident that your current design choices will meet your needs
  • You want to create a better space efficiency and/or flow throughout your home, to carve out more usable space, and/or to optimize the floor plan layout
  • You don’t want to scrap the whole design, but you know the design is not reaching its full potential
  • The design seems to be working generally, but it’s just not singing, and you can’t figure out why
  • You understand that some professional advice is helpful and will increase your opportunity to make this home a great place to live–one that you can’t wait to get home to and that you (and your friends) never want to leave

The fee is usually a fixed fee of $700.00 USD unless we feel more effort is needed on our part to complete the review. Generally, we allocate approximately 6-8 hours per Design Review. Before we get started on the review, if we feel more time is necessary, we’ll discuss whether you would like us to increase the fee (or switch to an hourly arrangement), decrease the scope of our review, or a combination of both.

Some reasons why more effort may be necessary include:

  • Your project is large and/or complex
  • You want us to review a lot of things (i.e. the scope of our review is large)
  • You wish to have a more collaborative design review experience where we have more back and forth exchanges of ideas. This takes a little more time, but we’ve received a lot of positive feedback from clients who opt for this added level of collaboration. For our clients who are designing their own projects themselves (in Sketchup or other modeling/drafting software), they have found it particularly rewarding to try out some of our suggestions in Sketchup, share the results, and then together keep iterating and updating the design more.
  • You would like us to provide additional services
    • Hardline (computer) drawings of final design review drawings
    • 3D (interior or exterior) view perspectives of design
    • In-depth research/studies (i.e. window wall development/research)
    • Additional consultation after the Design Review (i.e. after doing detailed drawings, during construction, etc.)

Our design review service is available anytime you’d like an expert second opinion on your project. We’re here to help you move forward with your project with confidence whether you’re just starting to design OR the design is already complete but you’re just not 100% sure you’ve got it right.

We will always say the sooner you get a design expert involved the better, because you want to make sure you’re getting the big design moves right and those happen at the beginning of the process. But, we also understand that sometimes you really do need to do five floor plan versions on your own and think through ideas yourself before you realize things. These are where good conversations come from and even better design variations.

Our Design Review process is meant to feel like a consultation where we give you our design opinion and suggestions for how to improve your design. You are free to do whatever you want with the design, whether you choose to incorporate our ideas into the design or not. You can easily share our sketches with your designer so that they can see what design changes you’d like to make to your project.

If your current designer or draftsperson is not collaborative or open to other ideas and will resent the involvement of another designer offering suggestions, you may want to reconsider either 1) working with your current designer/draftsperson or 2) if this Design Review Service is the best process given your current situation.

Our Design Review process is dependent on having access to your current design drawings. We need to see your design in order to offer suggestions on how to improve it. Without drawings, we can’t provide a design review.

Design drawings can be loose sketches, computerized drawings, or blueprints (.pdf, .dwg, jpg, and gif are the preferred file format). If you’re unsure as to whether your drawings will be adequate for a review, get in touch with us and inquire. Send us your drawings as you have them and we’ll let you know if they are adequate. 

In most cases, the answer is no. We don’t develop any drawings beyond our design review because the original design was not ours. Due in part to copyright and liability concerns of modifying other’s designs and in part to our own business preferences, we choose to decline the offer to develop designs that are not ours and make the important distinction in our studio to only develop detailed drawings for projects that we proactively help to create ourselves in active collaboration with our clients.

Interested in a Design Review?

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Design Review Inquiry