Check out Guido Porto from Austin. He does work in Houston as well. He designed the store Velleriano Italy in the Galleria and was just featured in the Austin Modern Home tour. We are using him to design a cottage to our home in Colorado

I follow the blog, Life of an Architect, by Bob Borson who is in Dallas. He sounds like an awesome architect to work with.

Life of An Architect - Bob Borson

8-10% is the bargain price where I am building. I supposedly got a "deal" at 12%.

I think there is a dollar amount, probably different in different parts of the country, where it doesn't make sense to hire an architect. I think I was on the cusp of that. If I had it to do all over again I would not go that route - expensive and because the budget was less ($850K all in) there's not a whole lot of architecture to be had for that price (I guess).

Since you don't say what your budget is, this is just a general comment which may apply to you or not.

If I was doing it again, I would look for a plan, then hire the cheap architect the builder uses to customize it for me. Even if he charged $20,000 (which is unlikely if you purchased a quality set of documents) that would still be about $50,000 cheaper. You could buy a lot of furniture or landscaping for that...or buy a new Acura and go on a cruise!

Good luck to you!

MSA in San Antonio does a variety of modern houses from MCM to soft to blocky modern. http://www.msaofsa.com/

Was a fixed rate per foot of covered space and was very reasonable and they did an awesome job of providing the very efficient floor plan and the soft modern style we wanted.

We didn't need any services from them past design, so this kept the cost down. Was way, way under the 8-10% of budget you had above.

One thing you will realize is that the "style" is largely external and finishes - the internal flow and layout will be largely the same for most exterior styles. The main challenge of block houses (at least in Texas) is figuring out where to put the AC units and they did a good job of routing that.

We ended up with them after the first, higher dollar architect crashed and burned with a pretty design that wasn't at all livable. The high dollar architect was after the designer, who was a good designer, but we realized in working with him that we needed more help on refining what we wanted than he could provide.

If you want more information, send me a message.

I've used architects three times, and I always hired one who charged strictly on the basis of time spent on the project. An estimate of 8-10% is actually pretty reasonable if the house is complicated and has lots of custom details, and you require hand holding from start to finish. Your objective should be: get a design you are satisfied with, get a level of plan detail that will get you your permits and provide a competent contractor sufficient info to do the job right, and invest some of your own time to oversee progress and finish details so that you aren't paying an architect big bucks to commute to the job site regularly and check on things you can just as easily do yourself.

On an investment as big as a house, and something you have to live with and in every day, don't go with someone who is cheap but gives you a blah design. There are many sets of modern house designs available for sale on the Internet for a fraction of what an architect would charge to come up with something from scratch, and there is nothing wrong with buying a set of plans at an economical price that is right or almost right for your needs and getting your contractor's cheap architect to tweak it if necessary (he probably can't do much damage).