The question behind the question
Every district client asks the fee question in code. What they say is "what will you charge". What they mean is "what am I actually paying for, if the contractor builds, the mason knows his work, and the materials come from the market".
After thirty years I can answer it in one sentence: you are not paying for the labour of the architect; you are paying for the envisioning capacity, which cannot be outsourced to anyone. The drawings you see pinned at site are evidence that the capacity was used. They are not the thing itself.
What the capacity is
It is the ability to see the building before it exists, completely enough that other people can build it without improvising.
It is the mason's question answered before the mason arrives. It is the wiring route imagined before the walls go up. It is the level difference between the driveway and the drawing room solved on paper, where it costs a pencil line, instead of on site, where it costs demolition. Nobody on site has that job. The contractor builds what is drawn. The supplier supplies what is ordered. The envisioning has one owner, and if you do not hire it, it gets done by nobody, or by whoever is standing on the site that day.
How the fee is staged, and what each stage buys
The practice publishes its stage sequence on how we work, and it is worth restating here with the reasoning visible.
The advance buys the first act of envisioning: the presentation drawings. It also does something the client cannot see from outside. It converts a conversation into a commitment. In thirty years of district practice, the clients who paid the advance willingly were the clients who finished their projects. The ones who wanted the drawings first and the money later produced the failures, the disputes, and the projects that stopped mid-drawing. The advance is not a formality. It is a filter that protects both of us.
From there the stages walk the building into existence. The working-drawings stage buys buildability, the set a contractor can actually construct from, dimensioned, coordinated, sequenced. The structural and MEP stages buy the invisible correctness, the beams, the load paths, the water and the power; nobody photographs these, and every building stands on them. The supervision stage buys the visit schedule built into the fee: the comparison of drawing against site, walked twice a week across the district and on a schedule agreed before work starts elsewhere. What that comparison catches is the subject of its own entry, Two visits a week; its value in one line is that a drawing nobody checks on site is a wish, not a document. Closure buys the end state: the handover, the fixes, the photographs of the finished building.
How the fee is quoted, and why the number moves
The fee is quoted per square foot, by typology, and staged across the engagement, so the figure is comparable with the one a builder or a lender will quote you in. What moves it is real rather than arbitrary: a tight plot, a hard structural brief, interiors carried in the same scope, a services-heavy programme, and the visit load the project's distance and duration imply. A small house on a difficult plot genuinely consumes more of the envisioning capacity than a large hall on an easy one, and the per-square-foot figure carries that difference. No band is published, because a band quoted before the site has been seen is a guess wearing a number.
What that buys, stated once more for the reader deciding: one person who has done this for thirty years, whose entire job during your project is to have already seen it, and to put that vision on paper so completely that your building arrives as it was imagined.
The stage triggers are on how we work, the deliverables at each stage on what you receive, and the practice's terms are set out plainly before any engagement, on the contact page.