Does a small flat need an architect?
At fifty square metres the stakes are higher than at three hundred, because there is no room for error. When a design pays off — and when it genuinely does not.
The answer is: sometimes yes, sometimes no — and we would rather say so plainly than talk someone into a project they do not need.
Why small is harder
It sounds contrary, but at fifty square metres the stakes are higher than at three hundred. Not in price — in precision.
In a large house a corridor can run inefficiently and nobody notices. In a small flat every wasted metre is three per cent of the floor area. A wardrobe thirty centimetres too deep blocks the passage. A badly placed door rules out the only sensible position for the bed.
We recently designed fifty-five square metres in a pre-war building in Warsaw's Żoliborz — and it was more exacting work than many a house.
When a design genuinely pays off
When you are moving walls or services. These are the most expensive decisions in any renovation and the hardest to undo.
When bespoke joinery is involved. A joiner will price what you draw. If you draw nothing, they will price what they think of themselves — usually whatever is simplest to build, not what is best to use.
When the flat has an awkward shape or an old layout. Sloping ceilings, recesses, chimney stacks, the crooked walls of a pre-war building — this is where intuition fails most often.
When you have no time. A design is also several dozen decisions someone has to make and verify for availability.
When it is not worth it
When you are not touching the layout or the services, the furniture is bought ready-made, and the work amounts to floors, walls and a bathroom from standard components. A good team will manage without documentation, and you will spend the money on something you can actually see.
The same applies if you enjoy the process and want to decide every detail yourself. A design then makes sense only for the technical part.
A middle road
You do not have to choose between a full project and nothing. Sometimes a consultation is enough — a few hours over the plan to settle the layout and avoid the mistakes that cannot be fixed later.
That is occasionally the most honest proposal we can make, and occasionally it is the one we make.
How to decide
Look at the list of things you want to change. If walls, services or anything made to measure appear on it, a design will pay for itself. If none of those three is there, you probably do not need one.
The first conversation with us is free and commits you to nothing — including to commissioning a project.