Designing and building a better home is a complex undertaking, but it doesn’t need to be difficult. We’re here to provide the guidance and support you need to make the process creative, fulfilling and even fun.
Welcome to different
You’ll be our partner. We’ll be your guides.
Wolfworks is a team of architects and builders collaborating as one. From the beginning you will be sitting side by side with your architect and builder. This relationship makes a world of difference.
The difference matters. It’s hard to imagine creating a truly satisfying project without investing time in thoughtful design, good communication, and a collaborative relationship.
We guide you from discovery to design to craft to enduring performance and lasting beauty. You’ll be our partners, we’ll be your guides. This is the process we rely on to take you there. Welcome to different.
Your experiences and expectations
set the stage.
You know your home. Tell us it’s story. Your lived experiences – good, bad and indifferent – are the place to begin. You’re creating a home that will be better at supporting how you would like to live, so we listen and learn.
Your house and site, the economics that will drive your decision making, and the ways in which you prefer to express your style and taste establish opportunities and reveal constraints. This is the ground we’ll stand on. Understanding this is the basis of the work we’ll do together. Let’s create a home that will respond to everything we hear.
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Get to know the process we rely on to guide and manage your project.
You’re new here, so we begin by getting oriented. You’ll learn what to expect from us, and what we’ll expect from you. We’ll describe your itinerary, calling attention to important milestones. It’s a process we know intimately and manage carefully, so you don’t have to. We expect that’s a relief.
Let’s listen to your house and site
In an existing home, let’s understand how it serves you; and doesn’t. Let’s question its bad habits; and how you’ve adapted to them, maybe without even noticing that you were. Let’s seek its virtues and be guided to build on them; preserving what delights and reconfiguring what frustrates. Let’s ask what it offers easily; and what may be a struggle. And let’s always ask what we can do with what we have before proposing the creation of additional space. Just as the woodworker, let’s strive to work with the grain.
The same thoughtfulness applies to building a new home. Let’s begin by learning these same things from the house you already know. With land and a new location, let’s be guided by its virtues and challenges: light, views, landscape, geography, and of course, solar potential.
The place you call home needs a
better screenplay
Coming up with a great plan begins by discovering patterns that fit together. Let’s reveal the patterns that will make your home great.
Let’s take all we know about you and your house and sketch and scheme until a satisfying solution is revealed. This phase is called Schematic Design.
With this plan in hand, you’ll take the ideas we present and discover what’s working. You’ll imagine living in and using new spaces. You will picture new vistas and consider the functional organization of what the new plans offer.
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We’ll share the experience and understanding that led us to each solution with you. You’ll add your knowledge to ours, bringing your life experience and familiarity with your home to enhance what we have proposed. At the conclusion of this Schematic Design phase you will hold in your hands a plan that is worthy of further development; a plan that exhibits the potential to make your good home great.
The place you call home needs a better screenplay.
Coming up with a great plan begins by discovering patterns that fit together. Let’s reveal the patterns that will make your home great.
Let’s take all we know about you and your house and sketch and scheme until a satisfying solution is revealed. This phase is called Schematic Design.
With this plan in hand, you’ll take the ideas we present and discover what’s working. You’ll imagine living in and using new spaces. You will picture new vistas and consider the functional organization of what the new plans offer.
more
We’ll share the experience and understanding that led us to each solution with you. You’ll add your knowledge to ours, bringing your life experience and familiarity with your home to enhance what we have proposed. At the conclusion of this Schematic Design phase you will hold in your hands a plan that is worthy of further development; a plan that exhibits the potential to make your good home great.
You’re enchanted with your plans.
Let’s confirm costs.
You’d like to know what’s possible at what cost. Your schematic plans provide a basis to develop reliable budget ranges for the project. Based on a general written scope of the work required, your Reality Check Budget anticipates costs for every category of construction; from foundation to finish. Your budget is broken down into distinct phases with low to high ranges that will allow you to evaluate each area of the project appropriately.
You want to make smart choices about your home’s design and its construction. Those choices will be guided by these budgets. They are developed in collaboration with our trade partners to assure you are provided with realistic budget ranges. In response you may choose to review and revise, taking this time to understand and be confident about where you’re headed. You’ll move forward, comfortable that you have a budget shaped by your informed decisions.
more
With this information and our guidance you are prepared to determine the scope of the project we intend to build. You want the assurance that you are pursuing a project that makes sense both functionally and financially. You’ll understand what’s necessary and what’s nice: choices where you have discretion. You will be able to “do the math” and consider the value of the investment, including important factors like the equity in your home, the trends in market value, and the time over which the investment will mature.
In an existing home you’ll also evaluate the intangible values: the things you love in your home that are irreplaceable, your location, your neighborhood, proximity to friends, work, or school, and of course, the opportunity to make your home a great place to live that will delight you every day. We will help you think through all this information, and share our experiences with the hundreds of others with whom we have traveled this path.
What is essential is that you arrive at a decision about the course we have set that is right for you. Comfortable with your choice and the financial framework we all understand and intend to operate within, you can now pursue the development of your design in earnest.
You’re enchanted with your plans.
Let’s confirm costs.
You’d like to know what’s possible at what cost. Your schematic plans provide a basis to develop reliable budget ranges for the project. Based on a general written scope of the work required, your Reality Check Budget anticipates costs for every category of construction; from foundation to finish. Your budget is broken down into distinct phases with low to high ranges that will allow you to evaluate each area of the project appropriately.
You want to make smart choices about your home’s design and its construction. Those choices will be guided by these budgets. They are developed in collaboration with our trade partners to assure you are provided with realistic budget ranges. In response you may choose to review and revise, taking this time to understand and be confident about where you’re headed. You’ll move forward, comfortable that you have a budget shaped by your informed decisions.
more
With this information and our guidance you are prepared to determine the scope of the project we intend to build. You want the assurance that you are pursuing a project that makes sense both functionally and financially. You’ll understand what’s necessary and what’s nice: choices where you have discretion. You will be able to “do the math” and consider the value of the investment, including important factors like the equity in your home, the trends in market value, and the time over which the investment will mature.
In an existing home you’ll also evaluate the intangible values: the things you love in your home that are irreplaceable, your location, your neighborhood, proximity to friends, work, or school, and of course, the opportunity to make your home a great place to live that will delight you every day. We will help you think through all this information, and share our experiences with the hundreds of others with whom we have traveled this path.
What is essential is that you arrive at a decision about the course we have set that is right for you. Comfortable with your choice and the financial framework we all understand and intend to operate within, you can now pursue the development of your design in earnest.
You’re now ready to go shopping.
With an established budget framework you can begin making product selections with comfort about their cost. One by one you will make selections and they will be quantified in your project documents.
more
While you are shopping, we are busy adding detail to your plans.
Drawings are created that display how your new space will look, document its engineering and mechanical systems, and show details that insure that everything will be built as planned. A written scope of this work is annotated to accurately describe every element. Costs are clear and your updated budget reflects that. Throughout this process we continue to practice our habit of meeting and listening to each other, sharing the goal of clear communication to ensure we end up building just what you want and need.
As you shop, we guide.
Your taste in color, texture, and form lead us toward a cohesive material palette. We respond to and comment on your choices, helping you understand how all the pieces will come together to create a delightful whole. We keep an eye on what’s already at work in your home’s architectural vocabulary to assure integrity with your choices. As we all agree on the products to include, the choices are documented in the drawings and written scope that will guide construction.
You’ve arrived at your design destination.
In your hands are a set of plans and specifications to produce the project we’ve all spent hours of hard work and thoughtful consideration creating. You have a contract to construct that project at a cost that everyone understands and is comfortable with. You’re ready to begin building, confident of the result.
You’re now ready to go shopping.
With an established budget framework you can begin making product selections with comfort about their cost. One by one you will make selections and they will be quantified in your project documents.
more
While you are shopping, we are busy adding detail to your plans.
Drawings are created that display how your new space will look, document its engineering and mechanical systems, and show details that insure that everything will be built as planned. A written scope of this work is annotated to accurately describe every element. Costs are clear and your updated budget reflects that. Throughout this process we continue to practice our habit of meeting and listening to each other, sharing the goal of clear communication to ensure we end up building just what you want and need.
As you shop, we guide.
Your taste in color, texture, and form lead us toward a cohesive material palette. We respond to and comment on your choices, helping you understand how all the pieces will come together to create a delightful whole. We keep an eye on what’s already at work in your home’s architectural vocabulary to assure integrity with your choices. As we all agree on the products to include, the choices are documented in the drawings and written scope that will guide construction.
You’ve arrived at your design destination.
In your hands are a set of plans and specifications to produce the project we’ve all spent hours of hard work and thoughtful consideration creating. You have a contract to construct that project at a cost that everyone understands and is comfortable with. You’re ready to begin building, confident of the result.
Now that you’ve finished planning your journey, it’s time to set sail.
Before we begin, we meet and listen again.
It is now the construction team’s turn to shine. The responsibility of the project now shifts to the construction team. Designers continue their involvement through direct collaboration with the Trades and Construction Manager. Our work together has produced a comprehensive set of instructions for the construction team to follow. Now they’re preparing to build just what we designed. They meet with you to make certain the plans are clear and your goals are understood.
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A building project requires your active participation.
If we’re working in your home, your daily schedule and the ways in which you ordinarily use parts of your house are likely to be disrupted to varying degrees as the project unfolds. As with every other phase of this process, we have dealt with this hundreds of times before and expect to do everything we can to make the experience manageable. It’s an adventure and should be enjoyed for the process of change that it truly is.
At your pre-construction conference your project leader walks you through the construction process, including a review of the plan, methods of communication, and site housekeeping issues. As always we will strive to communicate the systems that we rely on for success. This includes a contract everyone intends to follow, a set of plans and specifications that clearly identify all the parts, and a system that can accommodate requests for additional work or deal with unexpected conditions without interfering with the workflow.
If we’re constructing a new home, you will meet at regularly scheduled intervals at the job site to review progress, confirm decisions, and stay informed.
“After you work with Wolfworks your expectations become bigger. You never see a house in the same way again. Our house looks exactly like what we imagined, but it works better than we knew it could.”
– Michael and Lisa