In June, Marcos joined fellow architect Matthew Szymanski of Arx Design Collaborative at the AIA Conference on Architecture and Design in San Diego for a session on design-build practice.

The question they explored: what changes when the architect stays involved all the way through construction, instead of stepping back once drawings are handed off.

In a traditional model, that handoff is where things start to drift. Details get value engineered. Decisions get made on site without the person who understood the original intent behind them. In a design-build model, the architect stays in the room. That continuity is what keeps the original vision intact instead of letting it erode along the way.

Design-build looks different from firm to firm, and much of the session was spent walking through those variations with the architects in the room. Marcos used Alloi as one working example: architecture and construction under one roof, with our team on site alongside the trades and our in house carpenters, working through how custom details are actually fabricated and installed.

Marcos shared what this has meant in practice at Alloi over the years: closer collaboration between architect and builder, costs that are clear much earlier in the process, and craftsmanship that holds up because the person who designed the detail is still there when it gets built.

For homeowners, the takeaway is simple. The architect who designs your project should be the one who sees it through.