Tag

construction costs
Cartoon showing two workers constructing the wooden framing of a roof. The construction worker on the right using a power saw, while the one on the left holds the chord and says "That'll be $1,000,000,000 please."
Welcome back to our informal discussion about rising housing costs in Los Angeles. If you missed it, make sure you check out Part 1. If you’re back for Part 2, thank you for being here! I promise this one is shorter than the last. If you remember, we’ve been looking in depth at two critical...
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You know it’s bad when we get an email from a fellow architect, developer or client with the subject line “Please help!” and find they are attempting to navigate the convoluted City of Los Angeles’ permitting process. While COVID has rendered many business processes more difficult or even obsolete, residents are questioning how to get...
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Colored sketch rendering of a modern house embedded into a hill. Shows the road in front of the house, the driveway and garage, the front entryway, and multiple balconies on the front facade.
This blog is part two of the latest in our “Architecture in Practice” Series. If you didn’t catch the first part of this post, start here. Why houses cost so much in Los Angeles We were SO excited to officially own the lot, and somehow, we came up with a design approach almost immediately. (Fun...
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Colored sketch rendering of a modern house embedded into a hill. Shows the road in front of the house, the driveway and garage, the front entryway, and multiple balconies on the front facade.
First comes ownership, then comes design. I know what you’re all thinking. What ever happened to that spec house you guys were doing? Well, package a really strange pandemic that keeps going on and on and on with a very busy practice and next thing you know, the spec house got moved to the back...
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About three years ago, our team started looking for properties to develop in-house. If you haven’t noticed, there isn’t a ton of vacant land in Los Angeles. Finding something affordable with decent building opportunities is even harder. To evaluate each lot that came up in our land search, we had a mental checklist to see...
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Welcome to the start of our “Architecture in Practice” journey. If you missed our introduction piece, check it out here: Architecture in Practice. As we mentioned previously, early in her career, Tracy had the opportunity to act as both architect and developer (with her family) for three small spec houses in Santa Maria. This seems...
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Cartoon showing a car driving by a mountain with its trunk open. Multiple colored geometrical shapes are falling out of the open trunk.
We’re putting our Architecture Practice to work. Architects love designing. Seeing their imagined project upon completion is exciting. But there’s that in-between part that some feel they might be missing out on. So…Tracy A. Stone Architect has decided to jump in…and develop our own project. We are about to join our favorite readers, clients and...
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Cartoon with the title "recipe for high construction cost" on lined paper. Some listed items include "economic crash," "recession," "lack of skilled laborers," "tariffs on construction materials," "increased development fees," and "inefficient city review processes."
In our endeavor to be lifelong learners, we’ve started a new tradition at Tracy A. Stone Architect called… wait for it… “read the magazines that get mailed to the office.” Originally, we had decided to purge all the unwanted subscriptions (and if you know the design and construction industry, there are TONS that mysteriously show...
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