Custom home design has a reputation. It takes too long. It costs more than expected. At some point, the client — the person the project is supposed to be for — starts to feel like a peripheral figure in their own process. Meetings that produce more meetings. Weeks that pass with little to show. A vague sense that everyone is busy, but the project isn't really moving.

Most people assume this is just how it goes. It isn't.

The friction that defines so many residential projects isn't an unavoidable feature of serious design work. It's a structural inheritance — ways of working that made sense in a different era and have survived largely because the profession hasn't been in a hurry to replace them.

You can’t go through architecture school without being bombarded by “The Fountainhead”, that is simply a fact. For those unaware, “The Fountainhead” is a novel written by Ayn Rand, later adapted into a movie, portraying the exploits of Howard Roark, architect, full-time tortured artist, and part-time educator of the philistine public. For a significant portion of architecture students and most professors, Howard Roark was the man. Strong, visionary, uncompromising his work and art for the average, uneducated consumer. The dude was basically the architect version of Rocco Siffredi…