Avery Architecture & Design

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Mr. Avery was amazing. He was so knowledgeable about the city permit process and so helpful to our small condo assoc. Because of our limited budget we had to make the process as inexpensive as possible. He listened carefully and was completely responsive to our needs. The two of us who worked with him were so grateful for his patience and expertise and helpfulness. He thoroughly explained the City permit process to us and at the very beginning gave us a detailed list of what he would provide and of what we would do in the process. Of course he met with the Chicago city permit people and completed the necessary paperwork as well. Finally, he coached us through the permit process so we were able to complete the project.

For anyone who needs a knowledgeable, experienced, reliable, thorough and personable architect to work with I completely recommend his services. I feel he was fair in his price and more than provided the services we needed. In fact, we had to call him several times not included in his contract and once he had to come back to the building. He was completely available to us.

We had worked at the beginning of the project with another architect who was awful - never got back to us, took forever to come up with drawings, designed things that were no better than what I would have come up with - literally what we talked about, but with no value added, and generally cost us some money and several months, for nothing! We were fed up with Architects in general, and all set to let the contractor do the real design work (since we really liked the contractor we found). We hired Richard originally just to get his signature on whatever plans the contractor had, for the permits. Once we met with him, however, we completely changed our plan! Richard listened to what we wanted, had us go through pictures of things we liked and didn't like, and was able to synthesize that into designs that were either exactly what we asked for, or more often than not even more to our tastes than what we had thought we wanted! He had lots of ideas, and the technology to show us what they would look like with computer modeling on his laptop at every meeting. He was passionate about his design, but we never felt like he was designing _his_ house, always that he was helping us design _our_ house! Richard was regularly on hand during construction to see what the contractors were doing, and to advocate for us when needed. He even helped with the permit process (which in Chicago was not...easy). The only downside of working with Richard (and it is in some ways also an advantage!) is that he teaches architecture at a university downtown. That means that there was a couple weeks right around finals where it was a little harder to get a hold of him, and his normally excellent correspondence dropped down to merely good! Its over a year later now, and every week at some point one of us will turn to the other and say 'I love our house'. Thanks in no small part to Richard.

We were extremely happy with Richard and his work. He was the second architect we had hired for the project (the first architect took our money and disappeared) and right from the beginning, he understood what we wanted to do and how we wanted it to look. At our first meeting, he asked us to find some pictures in architectural magazines showing him the kinds of things we did and didn't like. He took those pictures, and came back with drawings that didn't look precisely like anything that we had showed him - but that we both instantly adored because it was exactly the kind of thing we wanted. He worked closely with us to fine-tune the design, and then once construction started, he was an invaluable resource to understand what was going on from a construction perspective and to be an advocate for us to the builder.