Architect or technician/engineer?

[Sunflowersinthehaze]

We are in the beginning stages of planning an extension on the back of our house. Is it better to go for a registered architect or could a technician be fine and just depends on the person? I read about more protection with an architect with ARB? Do technicians etc come with that protection? We are meeting with a range of different types soon.

A good architectural technician will be perfectly able to plan most house extensions. A bad architect would be perfectly able to mess up a simple house extension. Even a good registered architect who usually works on something completely different - like industrial projects - might not have much idea where to start. My point is, it comes down to the individual.

Find recommendations, read reviews, look at examples of previous work, meet with a few designers (a mix of architects and architectural technicians) and discuss what you want. See who inspires confidence. Take price into account too, but don't just choose based on that.

We used a registered architect for our extension, but in retrospect we may have paid over the odds. I caught a few issues in the design, luckily at the stage where the problems were on paper only, so we didn't have to find out how well protected we were as they were fixed at no cost.

I looked and gathered quotes for both options before doing my side return and loft and the cost of the RIBA architects were drastically higher than the architectural designers (3x higher). I went for an arch designer in the end and was very happy with the result, I think experience is key. I'm not sure where you are based but I used hometales (London) and they were fab. 5 years later too and the build is still in great condition x