Design & Build
A single contract covering design and construction, so the responsibility for whether the drawing works sits with the people building it.
What it involves
Design & Build
Most of what goes wrong on a construction project goes wrong at an interface — between the designer and the contractor, between the structural package and the services, between what was drawn and what can actually be built for the money. Design and build removes the largest of those interfaces by putting both on one contract.
What it does not do by itself is remove the risk. A design and build contract signed off a scheme design is a fixed price on a guess, and the variations start in month three. So we take the design to RIBA Stage 4 on our own account before we quote, and we quote from that. It is slower to get to a number and the number holds.
We work under JCT Design and Build 2016, with a contractor’s design portion where the client has already appointed an architect they want to keep. Roughly half our work is the latter, and we are happy to be the second half of somebody else’s team.
At a glance
- Typical value
- £2m–£18m
- Contract
- JCT D&B 2016
- Design to
- RIBA Stage 4
- Programme
- 9–26 months
Related work
Projects using this
Want a price?
Send us the drawings and the date. We will tell you within a week whether we are the right contractor and roughly what it costs.