Articles
On architecture and design
The questions clients ask before signing.
Private housesChoosing an architect: seven questions to ask before you signArchitects are chosen by the pictures in their portfolio, and clients then suffer over the drawings that never make it into a portfolio. A good visualisation costs a couple of hundred dollars and takes two days; a set a crew can actually build from is a hundred sheets, several months of work and a different level of responsibility altogether. You can tell one from the other before signing anything — if you ask the right questions.9 min readPrivate housesWhat it costs to build a villa in Bali in 2026A 200 m² villa with a pool in Bali costs 250,000–350,000 USD to build, land excluded. A 25-year lease on a plot in Canggu adds another 80,000–120,000; in Ubud it can be a third of that. Design, permits and legal due diligence come to roughly 8–12 % on top. The honest range for a finished villa: from 300,000 USD in Ubud to 500,000 near the coast.7 min readBathhousesDesigning a bathhouse: what to get right the first timeA Russian bathhouse usually gets rebuilt not because of the stove or the log walls, but because four things were skipped at the planning stage: ventilation, drainage, stove clearances and the ceiling height in the steam room. Each takes an hour to fix on paper and tens of thousands of roubles to fix in a finished building — and ventilation sometimes cannot be fixed at all.8 min readPrivate housesA house project: what it includes, what it costs and how long it takesA house project is the set of drawings and calculations builders work from, and the document you use to check that they are building what you are paying for. A complete set has three parts: architectural, structural and engineering. It costs from 600 ₽ per square metre for a single section up to 2 500 ₽/m² for a set that is ready to build from, and takes anywhere from three weeks to three and a half months depending on what exactly you order.14 min readPrivate housesStock plan or custom design: money, time and risk comparedA ready-made plan costs 25 000–55 000 ₽ and is yours the same day. A custom design starts at 600 ₽ per square metre and takes at least a month. The gap looks tenfold right up until you start counting the site adaptation, the foundation redesign for your soil and the missing sections — after which it narrows to one and a half or two times, and sometimes disappears entirely.9 min read
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