The week the architect disappears
Ask anyone who has built in the district. The building finishes, the final payment clears, and the architect who was weekly on site for a year becomes a name on a drawing. The client discovers that the building's knowledge lived in one person's head and walked away with him.
Handover, done properly, is the opposite of that disappearance. It is a deliverable with contents, and it is owed with the same seriousness as the working drawings.
What this practice hands over
A walkthrough against the brief. The client walks the building with the drawings, and every promise is checked in person: the level at the driveway, the light at the stair, the terrace drainage that was argued about in month three.
The snag list, closed. Small defects are not left for goodwill; they are listed, assigned and closed before closure is declared. Closure is when the list is empty, not when the payment arrives.
The photographs. Between fifteen and twenty photographs of the finished building, taken properly, are part of handover. Not a favour, not an extra. A documented building is worth more to its owner on the day he may one day sell, rent or extend it, and a district client should not have to hire a photographer to own the record of what he paid for.
The short video. The building walked, in one take. For the family it is the memory; for the practical client it is the before-state for every future renovation conversation.
And a request, made openly. The client is asked to post what he has received. This is stated as part of the practice's handover because it is the practice's marketing, acknowledged as such: thirty years with no advertising budget, carried entirely by clients showing their buildings. The honest version of that system is the client who receives good photographs and decides, freely, that his building is worth showing.
Why the client should demand this from any practice
Because handover is where the profession's real attitude shows. A practice that documents the building it is leaving behind has been keeping records all along. A practice that has nothing to hand over was keeping nothing, and the client inherits a building nobody can read: no as-built levels, no photographs, no record of what is inside the walls.
The next renovation architect, the next buyer, the next engineer, all of them start from whatever the handover left. Demand a real one.
The stage that carries handover, and its payment trigger, are on how we work, with the full deliverable list on what you receive.