What to expect at our first meeting

12 August 2025

You’ve done your research, you’ve contacted Woven Architects to come around to your site or house for an initial  meeting, so now what can you expect at the initial meeting?

Firstly, we aim to come to your place so we can see your properties special qualities and complexities.

We usually aim for our initial meetings to be around 1 hour in length, but may be more or less depending on the complexity of your potential project. During this time we try to cover the below key items:

-Introduce ourselves and who we are.

-Get to know a little about yourself.

-Listen to your goals and objectives for the project. We love to know what is important to you. This will also form the initial brief that we will base our Agreement/quote on.  If you’re unsure at this stage that’s perfectly fine, we can work it out together later on. In this case we may only price for the Concept Design Stage, or charge for early work at an hourly rate.

-Discuss your timeframes and budget. We don’t want to know your budget so we can go wild and in a lot of cases it can be quite the opposite.  Building can be expensive and we want to know that what we are designing for you, will be feasible for you.  There’s nothing more demoralizing for everyone involved that getting the most amazing design consented, but then it’s too expensive to build.  We can also use our experience to recommend more cost effective ways of achieving the results you desire.

-We will talk you through the basic building/consenting process specific for your project and what other consultants may be needed.

-Get your contact information so we can address our Agreement to you.

-Answer any initial questions you may have.

What we won’t to at the initial meeting:

-If you have an existing house or building in most cases we will need to site measure it, unless the existing drawings are really accurate.  We will do this site measure only once we’ve been engaged for the job, as they can be several hours of work.

-We won’t provide you with a design at the initial meeting.  We love to hear what you want to achieve, but design is a process.  If we give you a design on the spot, we may quickly realize it isn’t practical due to a site constraint or planning rule we only realize after the meeting. 

-We won’t tell you have much our services will be until we write an Agreement after the meeting. This Agreement will include what our fee does and doesn’t include.  It also lets us compare your project to similar previous projects and price them fairly.  We aim to provide a competitive price balanced with charging enough to provide a great quality service.

The Pūriri Hideaway site before design work began