Why the title matters
“We would rather resolve a problem than escalate it. That is the whole difference.”
The industry files us under project manager, or architectural consultant. Neither word describes what happens on our projects, so we use a third: project architect.
It is not a vanity title. Everyone in the practice is a trained architect, and that training changes the outcome the first time something goes wrong on site.
Take the case that comes up on almost every job. A house-style detail meets a local fire regulation that will not accept it. A project manager has one move — send it back to the design team and wait. Two weeks pass. The programme moves; the opening date does not. An architect can draw the compliant alternative that afternoon, test it against the house style, and put a decision in front of the maison instead of a problem.
Multiply that by the forty or so decisions a store fit-out throws up and you have the difference between opening with the campaign and opening after it.
Which is also why we spend so much of the programme at the front. Before a drawing is issued we work through landlord, regulation, site, sourcing and programme, and hand the maison a written strategy for each risk we can see. A risk named at inception has a plan. A risk found on site has a change order.
We work from Hong Kong, Taipei and Singapore, and deliver across Greater China, Taiwan, Korea, Macau and Singapore. Every one of those markets has its own code, its own landlord culture and its own contractor pool, so local knowledge is not optional. What does not change at the border is the standard.
