Why Hire a Church Design Expert and Not Just an Architect

The end of the calendar year is often a time when many churches begin planning for the new year and beyond for capital improvements or upgrades to their existing facilities and worship centers.

With church construction expenditures totaling $3.4 billion dollars in 2016 with a projected increase of over 4 percent expected in 2017, finding ways to maximize dollars that are raised towards expanding ministries may lead some church leaders to select partners for their building projects that may not deliver the desired results for sustainable growth.

Hiring a church design expert, and not simply an architect who may be unfamiliar with the needs of a place of worship, can allow your church to realize a greater return on your investment in your facilities.  For the church design experts at Studio Four Design, our knowledge and expertise in a variety of worship facility projects allows us to bring a unique perspective to our church clients.

In our experience, when your church or worship center is asking its congregation or members for a large capital investment, stewardship is an important point of emphasis for the design and creation of your space. The analogy that we allude to in our work is based upon the ideas of specialists; if you have a specific health or legal issue, you will consult with a doctor or lawyer who is a specialist in their chosen field. The same holds true for church and worship center design; instead of working with an architect who is a generalist in design, consulting and working with specialists in church design, like the team at Studio Four Design, can help you create specialized solutions specific for your individual needs.

There are a number of ways a firm that focuses on church facility design can help advance your project more smoothly, including:

Knowledge and Expertise: Specific problems related to church design are better suited for success when leveraging the knowledge and expertise of a specialist who has dealt with them before. Church designers can leverage a breadth of collective experience to solve problems specifically related to the needs of your church, while adding value in the planning process to help ensure an overall smooth delivery process. Our team’s experience can bring a new perspective to your church by asking specific questions and offering insights based on prior successes and lessons learned.  Our knowledge and experience can help to identify potential opportunities and obstacles that can be addressed in the planning stages and set the table for a successful design process.

Value: Experts in church design can bring higher value propositions to clients, based upon a broad scope view of what needs to be accomplished. A church design expert should be able to look beyond strictly “bricks and mortar” concepts in the design process and identify any components of the project that could impact or delay the building process and those that might add additional expense that should be considered within project and construction budgets. At Studio Four Design, our church design team can add value in this process through our experience to help develop realistic budgets and identify design alternatives to develop solutions to help enhance the mission of your church.

Teamwork: When you are searching for a church designer, understand that an expert may be more local than you may think. Although the expert you need may not reside in your particular town, through the application of technology they can be easily accessible via online meetings and web based project command centers that enhance project team communication. From a teamwork perspective, the use of technology can allow nearly instantaneous access to the design team, while decreasing costs associated with multiple travel expenses, thus allowing your church to save on expenditures. When you work with our team, you are working with a close-knit group who takes inspiration in solving problems for our clients.  This sense of teamwork and collaboration extends to how our team does business with our clients as well. In addition to our capabilities to utilize technology to facilitate the design process, our firm has also worked in association local architects to deliver projects.  Collaboration with a local design partner allows us to bring our specific experience to the church while using the local professional to help the team deal with local codes, zoning and other conditions that may be unique to the permitting and construction process.  In addition, a local partner can assist with drawing production, peer review, and quality control during construction.  This allows our clients to access our expertise while taking advantage of local familiarity and accessibility.

If your church or worship center is ready to expand your existing space or develop a brand new facility in 2017, taking advantage of our knowledge and expertise can help you to develop a design solution that will help you advance your mission. To learn more about our experience in church facility design, please contact Studio Four Design today to let our church design experts guide you through the process.