New Build Architect Cost in Richmond

When people ask what an architect costs for a new build, they usually mean one of two different things, and it is worth separating them at the outset. The first is the architect's professional fee — what you pay the practice to design the house, obtain planning permission, satisfy the Building Regulations, and produce the information your builder works from. The second is the total cost of the project, of which the architect's fee is only one part alongside the council's fees, the Community Infrastructure Levy, the surveys and reports, the structural and services design, and the construction cost itself. This page deals with both, because you cannot judge whether an architect's fee is good value without seeing what it protects and what it sits beside.

A new build is different from an extension or a conversion in a way that matters for fees. You are designing a whole dwelling from the ground up — foundations, structure, envelope, services, drainage, energy strategy and every internal space — and you are doing it on a site that has to satisfy planning policy in the round, not a short checklist. That means more design work, more coordination between disciplines, more supporting documents for the application, and a fuller set of construction information. It is precisely because a new build is a complete building rather than an alteration that the fee is a meaningful sum, and precisely why doing it properly repays the cost.

In Richmond specifically, the 'architect cost' question is bound up with the planning cost question, because a new home here almost always needs full planning permission and has to clear a demanding local policy bar. The design effort required to win permission on a constrained Richmond plot — a backland site, an infill gap, or a replacement dwelling in a conservation area — is a large part of what the fee pays for. A cheap fee that produces a scheme the council refuses is the most expensive outcome of all, because you pay again to put it right and lose months of time.

So the useful way to read this page is not 'how little can an architect cost' but 'what does a properly resourced architect cost, what does that fee buy across the RIBA stages, and how does it sit within the full cost of building a new home in Richmond'. That is the question a serious client should be asking on a high-value site, and it is the question Crown answers with a clear, fixed, stage-by-stage fee rather than a vague percentage that balloons as the project runs.

Architects generally price their work in one of three ways, and understanding them is the key to understanding the cost. The first and most traditional is a percentage of the construction cost: the fee is set as a percentage of what the building costs to build, so a more expensive house carries a larger fee. For a full architectural service on a house, that percentage commonly sits somewhere in the region of 8 to 15 per cent, with straightforward projects toward the lower end and bespoke, one-off new-build houses — exactly the kind Richmond attracts — toward the upper end because of the design and coordination involved.

The second is a fixed lump-sum fee: the practice agrees a set price for a defined scope of work, so you know the number in advance regardless of how the build cost moves. This is often the fairest and most transparent basis for a private client, because it removes the perverse incentive of a percentage fee (where the architect earns more if the build costs more) and it gives you certainty. The catch is that a fixed fee has to be based on a clearly defined scope; if you change the brief substantially, the fee is revisited. Crown works primarily on a clear fixed-fee basis for private houses, quoted stage by stage, so you always know what you are paying and for what.

The third is a time charge, billed at an hourly or daily rate. This suits work whose scope cannot be pinned down at the outset — early feasibility on a tricky site, or open-ended negotiation with the council — where neither a percentage nor a fixed fee can sensibly be set until more is known. Hourly rates vary with the seniority of the person doing the work and the practice's location, and a London practice in a high-cost borough such as Richmond will reflect that. Time charges are often used for the very first feasibility stage and then converted to a fixed fee once the scope is clear.

In practice, many new-build projects use a blend: a modest time-charge or fixed fee for initial feasibility, then a fixed fee (or an agreed percentage) for the main service once the brief and the site are understood. The important thing is that the basis of the fee, the scope it covers, and what triggers an extra charge are all written down clearly before work starts. A fee quoted as a bare percentage with no scope attached is where disputes come from; a fee quoted stage by stage against a defined scope is where certainty comes from.

The whole industry structures design and construction around the RIBA Plan of Work 2020, which divides a project into eight stages numbered 0 to 7. Architects spread their fee across these stages and invoice as each is completed, so understanding the stages is understanding where your money goes. It also lets you engage an architect for only part of the journey if you wish — for example up to planning permission — though for a new build there is real value in a single team carrying the design through to construction so the drawings that win permission are the same drawings that get built.

Stages 0 to 1 — Strategic Definition and Preparation and Briefing — are where the project is defined. Here we establish what you want to build, test whether the site can take it, gather the surveys and information needed, and agree a clear brief and budget. On a Richmond plot this stage does a lot of heavy lifting, because it is where we check the planning constraints — conservation area, listing, trees, flood zone, the borough's backland and garden policy — and give you an honest early view of what is achievable and at what cost, before you spend on a full design.

Stages 2 to 3 — Concept Design and Spatial Coordination — are where the house takes shape. Stage 2 produces the concept: the layout, form, massing and appearance, developed to the point where it can be discussed with the council and, usually, submitted for planning permission. Stage 3, Spatial Coordination, is where that design is properly coordinated with the structure and the building services so that all the thinking is done before technical design begins — the change in name from the old 'Developed Design' was deliberately made to stress that the design must genuinely be resolved by this point, not just prettier. A large share of the fee sits across stages 0 to 3, because this is where the design and the planning permission are won.

Stage 4 — Technical Design — is where the house becomes buildable. This is the detailed, technical stage: specifying materials and systems, integrating the structure and services, resolving construction details, and producing the information needed both for the Building Regulations application and for construction. It is a substantial slice of the fee — often of a similar order to all the earlier stages combined — because it turns an approved concept into a complete, coordinated, buildable set of information. Stages 5 to 7 — Manufacturing and Construction, Handover, and Use — cover the build itself, the completion and handover of the finished home, and its life in use, with the architect's role depending on how much construction-stage service you appoint.

Because the fee is spread across the RIBA stages, it helps to know roughly how it divides, so you can budget cash-flow and understand what you are paying for at each point. A common way to split a full architectural service is roughly a third for the work up to and including planning permission (stages 0 to 3), roughly a third for technical design and the Building Regulations package (stage 4), and roughly a third for the construction stage (stages 5 to 7). The exact split varies between practices and projects, but this gives a realistic picture: getting to planning is not the whole job, and the technical and construction stages together are as substantial as the design-and-planning work that precedes them.

This split matters for two practical reasons. First, cash-flow: you pay for each stage as it is done, not all at once, so the fee is spread over the life of the project rather than being a single up-front cost. Second, scope: it lets you appoint an architect for part of the journey if that suits you. Some clients appoint up to planning permission and then take a different route for technical design and construction — though on a bespoke new build we strongly favour continuity, because the practice that designed the house and won the permission understands it best and can carry it into construction without a costly and risky hand-over of information.

It also explains why a quote 'to planning' and a quote 'full service' are very different numbers, and why comparing architects on the planning-stage fee alone is misleading. A low fee to planning can hide a heavy fee for the technical and construction stages, or — worse — a scheme that is cheap to draw but expensive or impossible to build because the structure and services were never properly coordinated. A properly resourced fee across all the stages is what produces a house that is designed, permitted, detailed and built as one coherent process.

At Crown we quote the fee stage by stage against a defined scope, so you can see exactly what each part costs and can decide how far you want us to take the project. Because we hold architecture, structure and building services in-house, our stage 3 coordination and stage 4 technical design are genuinely integrated rather than three consultants trying to reconcile separate drawings — which is where a lot of new-build cost and delay is otherwise lost.

Richmond upon Thames is unlike anywhere else in London. Straddling the river in the south-west of the capital, it takes in Richmond itself, Twickenham, Teddington, Kew, Barnes, Mortlake, East Sheen, Hampton, Petersham and Ham, and it enjoys a longer stretch of the Thames — around ten miles — than any other London borough. Its landmarks are national ones: Richmond Park, the largest of London's royal parks at some 2,360 acres, enclosed as a deer park by Charles I in 1634 and still roamed by hundreds of red and fallow deer; the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, a World Heritage Site; Hampton Court Palace on the borough's edge; Strawberry Hill House, Horace Walpole's Georgian gothic villa; and Twickenham Stadium, the home of English rugby.

The town of Richmond takes its name from Richmond Palace, built by Henry VII in the early sixteenth century and closely associated with Elizabeth I, who died there in 1603. Through the eighteenth century, Richmond Bridge and a wave of Georgian terrace-building around Richmond Green and up Richmond Hill gave the town the elegant townscape that survives today, layered with Victorian, Edwardian and Queen Anne building. That deep architectural history is not just scenery — it is the reason the borough is so heavily designated and so protective of its character, and it is the backdrop against which every new-build proposal is judged.

The scale of that protection is striking. Richmond has 85 conservation areas and 831 listed buildings, and the council backs them with a detailed design framework, including village-specific supplementary planning documents covering places such as Barnes, East Sheen, East Twickenham, Hampton, Kew, Mortlake, Richmond, St Margarets, Strawberry Hill, Teddington and Twickenham. Add the river and its floodplain, the borough's many protected trees and Metropolitan Open Land, and you have a planning environment as demanding as any in the country. For a new build, this is the single biggest driver of the design effort — and therefore of the architect's fee.

The practical consequence is that new-build opportunities in Richmond are rarely open fields; they are constrained plots — a backland site behind existing houses, an infill gap in a street, a corner plot, or the site of a house to be demolished and replaced. Each carries its own character, amenity and policy constraints, and each demands a design that responds to its specific context. Understanding where a plot sits in Richmond's townscape, and what surrounds it, is the starting point both for a credible design and for a credible fee.

The first thing to be clear about is that building a brand-new dwelling almost always requires full planning permission. Permitted development rights — the national rules that let you extend or alter a house, or in some cases change the use of a building, without a full application — do not give you the right to build a new house on a plot. Creating a new dwelling is exactly the kind of development the planning system is designed to control, so with very limited exceptions a new build in Richmond means a full planning application assessed against the whole of the borough's Local Plan and the London Plan.

That is a more demanding process than a prior-approval or householder application, and it is a large part of why a new-build architect's fee is a meaningful sum. A full application has to demonstrate that the proposal is acceptable in principle on the site, that it respects local character and the amenity of neighbours, that it meets space and design standards, that it deals properly with trees, drainage, flood risk and energy, and that it accords with the specific policies of Richmond's Local Plan. Assembling that case — the drawings and the supporting documents that go with them — is skilled work, and it is what the design-and-planning slice of the fee pays for.

Richmond's current Local Plan was adopted on 3 July 2018, and it is the primary policy document against which your application will be judged, alongside the London Plan and national policy. Its policies on local character, amenity, housing mix and standards, and infill and backland development (discussed below) are the ones that most often decide new-build applications, and a scheme has to be designed with them in mind from the first sketch, not bolted on at the end. Designing to the policies is cheaper than designing against them and being refused.

There is one route that occasionally applies: where you are replacing an existing house with a new one, you still need full planning permission for the replacement, and the council will look closely at the size, footprint and character of the replacement compared with the original and its context. And where a site is genuinely exceptional, national policy contains a narrow route for isolated homes of outstanding design in the countryside — but that is a rarity and not the ordinary Richmond situation. For almost every Richmond new build, the answer is a full planning application, well designed and well supported.

Several policies in Richmond's 2018 Local Plan bear directly on a new-build home, and the design effort to satisfy them is a core part of what the architect's fee buys. Policy LP1, Local Character and Design Quality, requires new development to respond to and enhance the character of the area — its scale, form, materials, layout and relationship to neighbours — and it is reinforced by the borough's village-specific design SPDs. On a borough as heavily designated as Richmond, this is not a box-ticking exercise: a scheme that fails to sit well in its context is very likely to be refused, and getting the character response right is skilled architectural work.

Policy LP8, Amenity and Living Conditions, protects both the future occupants of the new home and the neighbours around it — daylight and sunlight, privacy, outlook, noise and overbearing impact. On the tight plots that characterise Richmond new builds, LP8 is frequently the policy on which an application turns, because a new house squeezed onto a backland or infill site can easily harm neighbours' light or privacy if it is not carefully designed. Demonstrating compliance often needs a considered layout and, sometimes, daylight and sunlight analysis — a supporting study that adds to the cost but can be decisive.

Policy LP35, Housing Mix and Standards, sets the space and quality standards new homes must meet, drawing on the nationally described space standards and the London Plan. It governs minimum internal floor areas, the number and size of bedrooms, storage, and other quality measures, so the design has to deliver homes of a proper size and standard rather than the maximum number of undersized units. The London Plan reinforces this with requirements such as a floor-to-ceiling height of at least 2.5 metres over most of the home, and minimum internal areas — for example a one-bedroom, one-person home of around 37 to 39 square metres at the smallest — which shape what a plot can realistically accommodate.

Policy LP39, Infill, Backland and Backgarden Development, is the one that most often decides whether a Richmond new-build plot exists at all. The policy sets a presumption against the loss of back gardens and controls infill and backland development carefully, because Richmond — like much of London — has resisted the 'garden-grabbing' that erodes the green, spacious character of its streets. It does not rule out all backland or infill development, but it requires that such schemes respect the character and grain of the area, protect neighbours' amenity, and avoid harming the openness and greenery that give Richmond its quality. Testing a plot against LP39 early is one of the most valuable things the feasibility stage does.

Because open sites are so rare in Richmond, new-build projects tend to fall into a few recognisable types, and the type of plot has a real effect on the design effort and therefore the fee. The most common is the backland plot — land behind existing houses, often a large rear garden or a former yard, reached by a narrow access. Backland sites are attractive because they exist in quantity, but they are the most heavily scrutinised under Policy LP39 and on amenity grounds, so they demand a careful design that protects neighbours' light and privacy and respects the grain of the area. That scrutiny is a design cost, and it is money well spent, because a poorly considered backland scheme is one of the most common Richmond refusals.

Infill plots — a gap in an otherwise built-up street frontage, or a corner plot — are often more straightforward in principle, because a new house completing a street can sit comfortably in its context. But the design still has to respond precisely to the rhythm, scale and materials of its neighbours, and infill in a conservation area brings additional heritage scrutiny. The design effort is in getting the new house to belong to the street rather than jar against it, which on a sensitive Richmond frontage is a real skill.

Replacement dwellings — demolishing an existing house and building a new one in its place — are a significant part of Richmond new-build work, particularly where an unremarkable post-war house sits on a good plot. The council will look at the size, footprint, height and character of the replacement against the original and its context, and against the amenity of neighbours. A replacement that is dramatically larger than what it replaces, or that harms the character of the street or a conservation area, invites refusal; a well-judged replacement that respects its context is very achievable. Demolition itself brings its own considerations, from party wall matters to the loss of any building of merit.

Whatever the plot, the design cost is driven by the constraints, not by the floor area alone. A simple infill house on an unconstrained street is a lighter design exercise than a backland house threading between neighbours' windows in a conservation area with protected trees. Part of what a good architect does at feasibility is read the plot honestly and tell you which kind of project it is — and therefore what the design will realistically cost and whether the numbers work at all.

A large part of the design fee on a new build is the work of turning a plot and a brief into a home that is both genuinely good to live in and compliant with the standards. Richmond's Policy LP35 and the London Plan set minimum internal floor areas, room sizes, storage and ceiling heights, and the design has to deliver these while making the most of the plot. On a constrained site, reconciling generous, well-lit, well-proportioned rooms with the site's boundaries, the neighbours' amenity and the minimum-area standards is a genuine design challenge — and doing it well is precisely what distinguishes a house that is a pleasure to live in from one that merely fits.

Space standards are not just floor area. The London Plan requires a floor-to-ceiling height of at least 2.5 metres over most of the home, sets minimum widths for key rooms, requires adequate built-in storage, and expects proper daylight, outlook and private amenity space. A new build has to provide a usable garden or outdoor space, somewhere to store bins and bikes, and rooms that work as real living spaces rather than the minimum on paper. Designing all of this into a constrained Richmond plot, while keeping within the footprint the planners will accept, is the heart of the concept and coordination stages.

Local character is the other half of the design brief, and in Richmond it is unusually demanding. Policy LP1 and the village design SPDs mean the external design — scale, roof form, materials, window proportions, the relationship to neighbours and to the street — has to respond to its specific context. A modern house can be entirely appropriate in the right setting, and a traditional one in another; what matters is that the design is a considered response to its place rather than a generic product dropped onto the plot. Getting this right is both what wins permission and what produces a house worth building.

This is why the design stages of a new build carry real fee, and why cutting them is a false economy. A house that meets the space standards, respects its neighbours' amenity, and sits well in a Richmond street is far more likely to be approved and far more valuable when built than one that maximises floor area at the expense of quality. The design fee is not a cost imposed on the project; it is the investment that makes the project both permissible and worth doing.

A new build is a complete structure designed from the ground up, and the structural engineering is a core part of the professional cost — one that Crown holds in-house alongside the architecture. Unlike an extension, where you are working around an existing building, a new house needs its entire structure designed: the foundations, the loadbearing walls or frame, the floors, the roof, and the way loads are carried safely to the ground. Getting this right from the concept stage, rather than bolting it on after the design is fixed, is what makes a scheme buildable and avoids expensive redesign later.

Foundations are the first structural question, and on a Richmond plot they can be a significant cost driver. The borough sits on varied ground, and much of it is near the Thames and its tributaries, so ground conditions, water table and nearby trees all affect the foundation design. Sites with clay soils and mature trees — common in Richmond's leafy streets — often need deeper foundations to cope with ground movement, and a site near the river may need to raise floor levels or design for flood resilience. A ground investigation early in the project turns these hidden risks into known numbers and lets the foundation design be right first time.

The superstructure — the walls, floors and roof — is designed to carry the loads of the building and to meet the Building Regulations for structural safety (Part A) alongside all the other performance requirements. On a new build there is real freedom in how this is done — traditional masonry, a timber frame, steel where large openings or spans are wanted — and the choice affects both cost and the architecture. Coordinating the structure with the architectural design and the services from the concept stage is exactly the integration that a single, multi-disciplinary team delivers and that separate consultants so often struggle with.

Because Crown designs the architecture and the structure together, the drawings that go to the council and then to your builder are structurally coherent from the outset. That avoids the classic new-build problem of a beautiful design that the engineer later has to compromise, or a structural solution that spoils the architecture — and it means the transition from planning permission to a buildable, coordinated technical design is smooth rather than a fresh round of reconciliation. That coordination is part of what an integrated fee buys.

A new house needs a complete set of building services — the mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems that make it work — and designing them is part of the professional cost. Heating and hot water, ventilation, electrical power and lighting, water supply and drainage, and increasingly renewable energy and smart controls all have to be designed and coordinated with the architecture and the structure. On a new build there is no existing system to work around, which is a freedom, but it also means every system has to be designed from scratch to modern standards.

The energy strategy is now central to the services design, because a new home has to meet demanding energy standards (discussed in the next section) and the Future Homes Standard is moving new build decisively toward low-carbon heating. In practice that means most new Richmond homes will be heated by an air-source or ground-source heat pump rather than a gas boiler, with a highly insulated, airtight fabric and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery to keep the home healthy and efficient. Designing the heat pump, the ventilation, the hot-water strategy and the controls as a coherent system — sized correctly for a well-insulated house — is skilled work that materially affects both comfort and running costs.

Drainage is a particular consideration in Richmond because of the river and the floodplain. Foul drainage has to connect to the public sewer or, rarely on a Richmond plot, a private system; surface-water drainage increasingly has to be managed on site through sustainable drainage (SuDS) — permeable surfaces, soakaways, rain gardens or attenuation — to avoid adding to flood risk and to satisfy policy. On a site in or near a flood zone, the drainage and flood strategy is a significant piece of design and a supporting document the application will need.

Coordinating services with the structure and the architecture is where a lot of new-build cost and frustration is otherwise lost — service runs that clash with beams, plant with nowhere to go, ceiling voids too shallow for ductwork. Because Crown coordinates architecture, structure and services in-house, these clashes are designed out on paper rather than discovered on site, which protects both the budget and the programme. That integrated coordination is one of the clearest ways the fee earns its keep on a new build.

Every new home must demonstrate that it meets the energy and carbon requirements of Part L of the Building Regulations, and this is assessed through an energy calculation (using the government's SAP methodology) that has to be produced both at design stage and again when the house is complete. The design-stage SAP models the fabric, the heating and the ventilation to show the home meets the required standard, and it is part of the technical design package rather than an afterthought. Getting the energy strategy right early — the insulation, airtightness, glazing and heating — is what makes the SAP work and keeps the running costs low.

The direction of travel is set by the Future Homes Standard, which raises the bar for new homes very significantly. Under the new standard, new homes are expected to produce far less carbon than those built to older regulations — on the order of 75 to 80 per cent less than the 2013 standard — by combining a high-performance fabric with low-carbon heating and, typically, solar photovoltaic panels. In practice that means heat pumps rather than gas boilers, much better insulation (with wall U-values tightened dramatically), tighter airtightness, mechanical ventilation and, on many homes, solar PV. Designing to this standard from the outset is essential, because retrofitting compliance onto a design conceived for gas heating is expensive and clumsy.

For a Richmond new build, this has both a cost and a design implication. There is an additional build cost to meeting the higher fabric and low-carbon-heating standards — the government's own impact assessment put the average additional cost per new home in the low thousands of pounds — but that cost buys much lower running costs and a future-proofed home, and it is far cheaper designed in than bolted on. The design implication is that the energy strategy has to be integrated with the architecture and the services from the concept stage: where the plant goes, how the fabric is built, where the PV sits, and how the ventilation is arranged all affect the design.

Because Crown designs the architecture, structure and services together, the energy strategy is woven into the scheme from the start rather than being handed to a separate consultant to make work afterwards. That means the SAP calculation, the fabric specification and the heating and ventilation design are coordinated, the house genuinely performs as designed, and there are no unwelcome surprises when the as-built SAP is produced at completion. Designing to the Future Homes Standard is now simply part of what a competent new-build service must do.

Richmond's defining feature — the River Thames and its ten miles of frontage — is also one of its defining planning constraints, because large parts of the borough lie within the Thames floodplain. Any new build on or near the floodplain has to be designed with flood risk in mind, and a flood risk assessment is a common and sometimes decisive supporting document. Depending on the flood zone, the design may need to raise finished floor levels, use flood-resilient construction, provide safe access and escape, and demonstrate that the development does not increase flood risk elsewhere.

Surface-water drainage is governed by sustainable drainage principles, and a new build is expected to manage rainfall on site rather than simply piping it to the sewer. That means permeable paving, soakaways, rain gardens, green roofs or attenuation tanks designed to slow and store water, reducing the risk of flooding and the load on the drainage network. On a Richmond plot with heavy clay or a high water table, designing a SuDS scheme that actually works takes real thought, and it is part of the drainage design the technical stage delivers.

Foul drainage has to be designed too — connecting the new home to the public sewer, checking capacity, and dealing with levels and pumping where the site falls the wrong way. On a backland plot reached by a narrow access, getting drainage across the site to the sewer can be a genuine design and cost issue, and it is one of the practical constraints that has to be resolved early rather than discovered on site.

Trees add another layer, because Richmond's streets and gardens are richly treed and many trees are protected by tree preservation orders or by conservation-area status. A new build has to be designed around the root protection areas of retained trees, which affects the foundation design, the drainage and the footprint. An arboricultural survey and method statement is a common supporting document, and the tree constraints frequently shape where on a plot a new house can actually sit. All of this is part of the design work — and part of why the feasibility and design stages carry real fee.

Many Richmond new builds involve demolishing an existing building first — most obviously on a replacement-dwelling plot, but also where an old outbuilding or garage is cleared for a backland or infill house. Demolition itself is a controlled activity: it needs to be notified and, in a conservation area or where a building is of merit, may need consent, and it has to be carried out safely with proper regard to neighbouring buildings and the public. On a tight urban plot, planning the demolition carefully is part of getting the project off to a clean start.

The Party Wall etc. Act 1996 is very likely to apply to a new build on a constrained Richmond plot, because new foundations near a boundary, or building up to or astride a party boundary, engage the Act. Where it applies, you must serve notice on the affected neighbours before starting, and if they do not consent, party wall surveyors are appointed to agree an award that protects both parties. This is a legal process separate from planning and Building Regulations, and it carries its own cost and timescale — commonly a few hundred to a couple of thousand pounds per neighbour where surveyors are involved — which has to be budgeted for on any new build near a boundary.

Building close to neighbours also shapes the design and the construction method. Excavating foundations next to an existing house, working within the root protection area of a boundary tree, or building up to a shared boundary all require care both in the design and on site, and the structural design has to account for the effect on neighbouring structures. On the tightest backland plots, the practicality of getting materials and machinery to the site through a narrow access is itself a constraint that affects the build cost.

None of this is unusual — it is the normal reality of building a new home on a constrained plot in an established, high-value borough — but it is real cost and real process that has to be planned for. Identifying the demolition, party wall and neighbouring-building issues at feasibility, and designing and sequencing the project around them, is part of what a properly resourced professional service delivers and what keeps a Richmond new build from stalling once it reaches site.

One cost that catches many new-build clients out is the Community Infrastructure Levy, or CIL — a charge levied on new floorspace to fund infrastructure, and it applies to new dwellings. In Richmond, CIL is charged per square metre of net additional floorspace, and the rates are not trivial. Richmond's own borough CIL, which came into effect in November 2014 at base rates of £250 per square metre (higher band) and £190 (lower band), is index-linked and by 2025 stood at around £409 per square metre for the higher band and £310.84 for the lower band. On top of that sits the Mayor of London's CIL, charged at £80 per square metre across the borough on most development.

The practical effect is significant. A new house of, say, 200 square metres could attract a borough CIL running into tens of thousands of pounds, plus the Mayoral CIL on top — a cost that is entirely separate from the architect's fee, the council's application fee and the build cost, and one that many people do not budget for. CIL is calculated on the net additional floorspace, so where you are replacing an existing building, the floorspace of the building being demolished can, in defined circumstances, be offset against the new floorspace — which is exactly the kind of detail that materially affects the number and needs to be got right.

There are exemptions and reliefs worth knowing about. A self-build exemption is available where you are building your own home to live in, which can remove the borough CIL liability entirely — but it is not automatic: you have to apply for it, and comply with the procedure, before starting work, or you lose it. Getting the CIL position right, claiming any exemption correctly and on time, and calculating any offset for demolished floorspace is part of managing the true cost of a Richmond new build, and it is an area where a mistake is expensive.

Alongside CIL, larger schemes can attract planning obligations under a Section 106 agreement, and depending on the number of homes an affordable-housing contribution can apply — though for a single new house these are usually less of an issue than CIL. The key point is that the levy and any obligations are real, borough-specific costs that sit outside the architect's fee, and a proper cost appraisal for a Richmond new build has to include them from the start rather than treating the architect's fee and the build cost as the whole picture.

A new-build application and the construction that follows need a substantial set of drawings and documents, and producing them is what the fee pays for. At feasibility and briefing we prepare a measured survey of the site, review the planning history and constraints, and produce sketch options that test what the plot can take. This early work is where the biggest decisions are made, and where an honest appraisal of what is achievable — and at what cost — saves far more than it costs.

For the planning application we prepare the full concept-design package: the site plan and location plan, existing and proposed floor plans, elevations and sections, and the drawings that show how the new house sits in its context — street elevations, contextual views and, where needed, a design and access statement explaining the design rationale against Richmond's policies. Depending on the site, the application will also need supporting documents such as a daylight and sunlight assessment, an arboricultural report, a flood risk assessment, a drainage strategy, an ecology survey, a heritage statement in a conservation area, and an energy statement. Each of these is a real piece of work, and part of the professional cost is knowing which the site actually needs.

Once permission is granted, the technical-design stage produces the information needed for the Building Regulations application and for construction: detailed construction drawings, the structural design and calculations, the building-services and drainage design, the SAP energy calculation, specifications, and the coordinated details that tell the builder exactly how the house goes together. This is the largest single body of drawing work on a new build, and it is where the design becomes genuinely buildable. A house that is well detailed at this stage is faster, cheaper and less risky to build than one where the details are left to be resolved on site.

Throughout, the aim is a coordinated, internally consistent set of information — the architecture, the structure, the services and the energy strategy all agreeing with one another — so the builder works from one coherent source rather than reconciling contradictory drawings. Because Crown produces all of it in-house, that coordination is built in rather than negotiated between separate firms, which is one of the clearest ways an integrated fee delivers value on a new build.

The process begins with feasibility, and on a new build it is the most important stage of all. We survey the site, check the planning history and every constraint — conservation area, listing, trees, flood zone, the borough's backland and character policies — and produce sketch options that test what the plot can realistically take. This is where we give you an honest view of whether the new home you have in mind is achievable, by what design, and at roughly what cost, before you commit to a full design or, ideally, before you complete a purchase. Pre-application advice from Richmond is available and is often worthwhile on a new build, because a written steer from the council on a constrained plot reduces the risk of a wasted full application.

With the brief and the constraints understood, we develop the concept design and prepare the full planning application, coordinating the architecture, structure and services so the scheme is buildable, not just presentable. We submit and manage the application through Richmond's validation and determination process, respond to the case officer's queries, and negotiate amendments where that will secure approval. A new-build application runs against the usual targets — commonly around eight weeks for a smaller scheme, longer for larger or more complex proposals or where a committee decision is needed — and a well-prepared, policy-compliant application that anticipates the officer's concerns is the one that moves smoothly to approval.

Once planning permission is granted, we move into technical design and the Building Regulations application, producing the detailed, coordinated information the house needs to be built and to comply with the regulations — structure, energy, fire safety, drainage and the rest. Building Regulations approval is a separate consent from planning permission, and both are needed before and during construction. Because we design with the Building Regulations and the structural reality in mind from the start, the move from planning to a buildable technical design is smooth rather than a fresh round of redesign.

Through construction, we can provide as much or as little service as you appoint — from answering the builder's queries and inspecting the work at key stages, to full contract administration where we act on your behalf to manage the builder, certify payments and protect quality. Because the same team that designed and permitted the house carries it into construction, the information is understood and the intent is protected, which is exactly what a coordinated, single-practice service is for.

It helps to put the whole cost picture together, because the architect's fee only makes sense in context. Start with the build cost, since the fee is usually a percentage of it. A good-quality, architect-designed new-build home in London and the south-east typically costs somewhere in the region of £2,800 to £3,500 or more per square metre to construct, with premium specifications higher still; budget builds can be lower and high-end homes considerably higher. London carries a premium of roughly a quarter to a third over national averages, driven by labour rates, material delivery and stricter requirements — and Richmond, as a high-value borough, sits firmly in that London band. A 200-square-metre house therefore has a build cost well into the six figures before fees, levies and land.

The architect's fee, for a full service from brief to completed home, is commonly in the region of 8 to 15 per cent of that build cost, with bespoke one-off houses toward the upper end because of the design and coordination involved. On a Richmond new build that is a meaningful sum, but it is spread across the RIBA stages over the life of the project and it buys the design, the planning permission, the technical and structural design, the energy strategy, and the coordinated information the house is built from. Where we work on a fixed fee, we quote it stage by stage against a defined scope so you know the number in advance and pay as each stage is done.

Then there are the other real costs that sit outside the architect's fee. The council's planning application fee for a new dwelling is a fixed statutory charge. The Community Infrastructure Levy — Richmond's borough CIL at around £409 per square metre (higher band) plus the £80 Mayoral CIL — can run to tens of thousands of pounds on a substantial house, unless a self-build exemption applies. The specialist surveys and reports the application needs — daylight and sunlight, trees, flood risk, drainage, ecology, heritage, energy — each carry their own cost. And party wall awards, demolition and the ground investigation all add to the total.

The honest way to appraise a Richmond new build is therefore to add up the build cost, the architect's and other professional fees, the council fee, the CIL and any obligations, the surveys and reports, and a proper contingency — and to weigh the total against the realistic end value and, if you are buying the plot, the purchase price. On Richmond's high land values a well-executed new build can be genuinely worthwhile, but the numbers have to be built from the parts and tested honestly. That is exactly the appraisal we help clients do at the outset, so the decision to build is made on facts rather than on a single headline figure.

It is tempting to see the architect's fee purely as a cost to minimise, but on a new build — and especially on a high-value, high-constraint site like Richmond — the fee is better understood as the thing that protects the far larger sums at stake. The build cost, the land value and the end value of the house dwarf the fee, and the quality of the design and coordination has a direct effect on all three. A well-designed house wins permission, avoids costly refusals and delays, builds efficiently because the information is coordinated, and is worth more when finished. A poorly resourced design does the opposite, and the savings on the fee are wiped out many times over.

The most expensive outcome on any new build is a refusal, because it costs the wasted fees and application costs, the months of lost time, and often a compromised resubmission — and on a constrained Richmond plot, where the policy bar is high, a cheaply designed scheme that ignores local character or neighbours' amenity is exactly the kind that gets refused. The design fee that produces a policy-compliant, well-contextualised scheme is an investment in getting permission first time, which is worth far more than the fee itself.

The second expensive outcome is a scheme that is cheap to draw but expensive to build, because the structure, services and energy strategy were never properly coordinated. On site, uncoordinated information means variations, delays and disputes — the builder pricing in risk, then charging for the changes as the gaps emerge. A properly detailed, coordinated technical design costs more in fee but saves far more in build cost and programme, because the house is designed to be built rather than figured out as it goes up.

This is the core of why Crown holds architecture, structure and building services in-house: it is the coordination between those disciplines that determines whether a new build goes smoothly or badly, and coordinating them within one practice is far more reliable than reconciling three separate firms. The fee for an integrated service is not a premium for its own sake; it is what buys a house that is designed, permitted, detailed and built as one coherent process — which, on a Richmond-scale project, is where the real money is protected.

Understanding why new-build applications fail in Richmond is the best way to make sure yours does not — and most refusals come down to a handful of recurring themes. The most common is harm to local character: a scheme whose scale, form, materials or relationship to its neighbours does not sit comfortably in a street or conservation area falls foul of Policy LP1 and the village design SPDs. Richmond guards its townscape closely, and a design that does not genuinely respond to its context is one of the surest routes to refusal.

The second is harm to neighbours' amenity — loss of daylight or sunlight, loss of privacy through overlooking, or an overbearing impact — which engages Policy LP8. On the tight backland and infill plots that characterise Richmond new builds, this is frequently the decisive issue, because a new house squeezed onto a constrained site can easily harm the neighbours around it. A careful layout, and often a daylight and sunlight study to demonstrate the impact is acceptable, is what answers this concern.

The third is the backland and garden-land issue under Policy LP39: a scheme that erodes the green, spacious character of the area, that loses valued back garden, or that represents cramped over-development of a backland plot invites refusal. Richmond has consciously resisted garden-grabbing, so a backland scheme has to demonstrate positively that it respects the grain and character of the area and does not harm what makes the place attractive. Related failures include inadequate provision for trees, flood risk or drainage, and homes that fall short of the space standards under Policy LP35.

Our approach is to anticipate every one of these reasons and answer it in the application itself — to design to the policies from the first sketch, to test the scheme honestly against character, amenity and the backland policy, and to provide the supporting studies the site needs. And where a plot is genuinely marginal, we say so at feasibility rather than taking a fee to submit an application designed to fail. A refusal is the most expensive outcome of all, and avoiding it is what a properly resourced design service is for.

Crown Architecture designs new homes across Richmond upon Thames and the surrounding boroughs, and we do it as a single coordinated service: the architectural design, the structural engineering and the building-services design under one roof. On a new build, where the whole house is designed from the ground up and every discipline is interdependent, that integration matters more than on almost any other project type — it is the difference between a house that is designed, permitted, detailed and built as one coherent process and one where three separate firms try to reconcile their drawings after the event.

We know the Richmond context: the borough's 85 conservation areas and 831 listed buildings, its village-specific design guidance, the pressure on backland and garden-land plots under Policy LP39, the amenity scrutiny under LP8, the space standards under LP35, the Thames floodplain, the protected trees, and the real cost of the Community Infrastructure Levy on new floorspace. We use that knowledge to give you honest advice at feasibility — ideally before you buy — and to prepare applications, by the right route, that are designed to be approved rather than hoped through.

We are also straightforward about cost. We quote a clear fixed fee, stage by stage against a defined scope, so you know what you are paying and for what, and we set the fee in the context of the whole project cost — build cost, council fee, CIL, surveys and reports, and a proper contingency — rather than quoting a bare percentage that balloons as the job runs. We tell you where the costs and the risks really sit, and we build the appraisal from the parts so the decision to proceed is made on facts.

And we stay with the project from the first survey to the finished home. We develop the design, manage the planning application through Richmond's process, produce the technical and Building Regulations information, and — as far as you appoint us — administer the construction, all coordinated within one practice so the intent that won permission is the intent that gets built. The aim is a single, accountable point of contact for a complex, high-value project, rather than a set of drawings handed over and a client left to navigate the borough's constraints alone.

If you are considering building a new home in Richmond — whether it is a backland plot, an infill gap, or a replacement dwelling — send us the address and what you have in mind, and we will tell you honestly what is achievable, by what design, roughly what it will cost across the build and the fees, and how to get there.