A residential architecture practice is a small studio of designers, draftsmen and site architects serving owners who change their minds. This is how to run people when drawings, approvals and site visits compete for the same hours.
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Share your requirementsA residential architect designs homes, villas and apartments for private owners. The studio is a principal architect, a few project architects, junior architects, interior or landscape designers, 3D visualisers, draftsmen and interns, with a site architect or supervisor who visits builds. Work moves through concept, drawings, approvals and site coordination, each owner asking for revisions. Deadlines come from authority submissions, owners' travel and builders' schedules. Long hours before a presentation are normal. Juniors learn drawing standards from whoever has time, and many leave to start their own studio. The principal's name carries the work, so continuity is fragile. For the wider sector, read HR for construction and real estate.
These are the places the people side of this kind of business tends to give way. The rest of this page works through them.
HR here has to work for each of these groups, not only the office. The set-up below is written with all of them in mind.
GullyHR runs talent acquisition for permanent roles in residential architects. For each role we agree the job description with you, find and screen candidates against it, and support the offer through to joining. Tell us the role and the number of people, and we start there.
We recruit permanent employees. We do not supply contract or temporary staff.
Every business interviews, but few have a written process that works the same way for every role and every interviewer. GullyHR designs yours, from the role brief to the offer, trains your managers to run it, and can run it for you on the roles you hand us.
We agree what the role must deliver, the must-have and nice-to-have skills, and how each will be scored.
Screening call, assessment, interview rounds and decision points, sized to the role and the number of people you hire.
Structured questions for each role family and a rating guide, so two interviewers judge the same answer the same way.
A short briefing for your managers on what to ask, what to avoid and how to give a clear yes or no.
Who approves, how the offer is made, and how candidates are kept informed from first call to joining.
An owner changes the kitchen after the drawings are issued, and the team redraws overnight with no record of why.
Studios work late before every client meeting and authority submission, and juniors quietly pay for it with health and weekends.
Layers, naming and title blocks vary by who drew them, and a new person spends weeks guessing the studio's style.
Interns draw, model and render for months on small stipends, then move on with no feedback.
Project architects sit at the desk because deadlines press, and builders go unchecked until a mistake is built.
After three or four years, the best junior sees no growth and sets up her own studio.
Versions of a plan sit on personal laptops and phones, and the issued drawing is not always the latest.
Decisions on design, fees and hiring all stop at one person, who is often on site.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Learning and Development; Career and Succession Management; Organisation Design. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for construction and real estate, not in general.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
Structure, reporting lines and who is allowed to decide what.
How many people, in which roles, by when — and what they will cost.
Requisition to joining, the same way every time.
A first day that is the same for the fifth joiner as the first.
Records, attendance, leave and the day-to-day HR that must simply work.
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
Goals, reviews and ratings that hold up in a conversation.
Communication, recognition and the conditions people actually work in.
Two routes — one for complaints, one for conduct — kept separate.
Policies a manager can apply, and obligations with owners and dates.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
Who leaves, when, why — and which of them mattered.
Resignation to relieving letter, in a defined order.
Records that survive people, and approvals that do not queue.
A short monthly pack management actually reads.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
The pieces a residential architects business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
Templates, layers, naming and a checking step before issue, taught in the first week.
Templates, layers, naming and a checking step before issue, taught in the first week. Teach it through a short learning routine.
A revision register stating who asked, what changed and whether the fee or time changed, so repeated redrawing is visible.
A revision register stating who asked, what changed and whether the fee or time changed, so repeated redrawing is visible.
A calendar of submissions and presentations with leave blocked sparingly and rest after each peak.
A calendar of submissions and presentations with leave blocked sparingly and rest after each peak. See shift and leave steps.
A letter with duration, tasks, a mentor, feedback at the end and a clear stipend, kept in your HR documents.
A letter with duration, tasks, a mentor, feedback at the end and a clear stipend, kept in your HR documents.
Booked in the calendar with a checklist and a report, handled by a named person, with a second architect as cover.
Booked in the calendar with a checklist and a report, handled by a named person, with a second architect as cover.
Stages from drafting to project architect, with the skills and projects needed at each.
Stages from drafting to project architect, with the skills and projects needed at each. Link it to a yearly performance talk.
Before changing anything, find out what is true today. These checks take an afternoon and tell you which of the topics above to start with.
Share your requirementsConfirm with a qualified professional. What applies to you depends on your business, your state and your arrangements, and it changes. This page describes practice. It does not state a legal position.
The services below fit this kind of business best. Each starts by recording where you stand, and every later report compares against that. We do not promise outcomes.
A drawing standard and mentoring routine so juniors grow without waiting for spare time.
Stages and yearly conversations that show a junior what comes next.
Intern letters, offers and role descriptions that set expectations early.
A planned approach to peak weeks that protects rest and leave.
Start with a free conversation, or see the paid HR Diagnostic.
Understand the business, its workforce, current processes and HR challenges.
Find the missing, weak, inconsistent or person-dependent processes.
Create the structure, processes, policies, SOPs, dashboards and systems needed.
Help HR and department managers actually adopt the new system.
Digitise repetitive and approval-based workflows where it is worth doing.
Track hiring, attendance, employee cost, performance, training and attrition.
Strengthen the people-management system continuously, not once.
From the GullyHR blog: one on HR in construction and real estate, and one on each of the topics this page points to.
Site engineers, supervisors, crews and sales teams leave for different reasons. How to ask what shaped their decision and act on it between projects.
8 min readRead article
A founder's guide to hiring freshers and running a first-year programme: campus or open drives, a screening round, a training plan by quarter, mentors and checkpoints.
6 min readRead article
A two-hour exercise that names the roles you could not fill quickly, who could cover them, and what readiness would actually require.
7 min readRead article
A founder's guide to building job grades, titles and billing levels for a growing IT services firm, with a step-by-step method and a grade description outline.
6 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
Publish the submission calendar, start checklists earlier and set a cut-off for owner changes. Confirm working-hour rules with a qualified professional.
Give them a written plan, a mentor and honest feedback. Real work is fine if they learn from it and the terms are clear.
Record every revision, state what is included in the fee and agree a charge or time extension for extra rounds with the owner.
Show a path to project architect with milestones, give them responsibility for a small project and review pay each year.
A written standard, templates, a second-person check before issue and a short training in the first week.
Yes, by defining which decisions the project architects may take on design, fees and site, and checking results monthly.
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