Choosing an Architect Who Will Still Answer the Phone in Year Three

Most people choosing an architect in Kolkata are, without realising it, running a beauty contest. You look at portfolios, you look at elevations, you look at a 3D render of a facade at dusk with warm light spilling out of the windows, and you pick the one that made you feel something. That is a perfectly human way to choose, and it is also the reason so many plot owners in New Town, Salt Lake and Rajarhat end up stranded eighteen months later with a half-finished shell, a contractor improvising details, and an architect who has stopped replying on WhatsApp.

We have been practising out of New Town since 2014 and we have delivered 330+ buildings across New Town, Salt Lake, Rajarhat and greater Kolkata, and the single most common thing we hear from an owner who comes to us mid-project is not that the earlier design was bad. It is that the earlier architect went quiet. Sanction came through, the drawings were handed over, the fee was collected, and then somewhere around the first-floor slab the calls started going unreturned, and by the time the owner needed a revised drawing for a site condition nobody had anticipated, there was nobody on the other end who remembered why anything had been drawn that way.

So this is a piece about the boring, unglamorous, deeply consequential question that almost nobody asks at the hiring stage, which is whether this person will still pick up the phone in year three. A building in Kolkata is not a nine-month transaction. From first sketch to completion certificate to the first monsoon that actually tests your terrace, you are looking at a relationship that runs three to five years, and the criteria that predict a good three-year relationship are almost entirely different from the criteria that win a portfolio review.

Why year three is the year that matters

Year one is easy, and every architect looks good in year one, because year one is drawings and renders and site visits where everyone is optimistic and nothing has gone wrong yet. Year two is where sanction, structural coordination and the actual build sit, and most reasonably competent practices survive year two because there is still money left on the table and the work is visibly incomplete, so the incentive to stay engaged is obvious.

Year three is different, right. Year three is when the fee is substantially drawn down, the building is standing, and what remains is the unglamorous tail of the job. Completion and occupancy paperwork, a mutation and assessment follow-up, a joint that has started weeping after the first heavy monsoon season, a neighbour raising a boundary question, a bank asking for a stamped drawing you filed two years ago. None of that is billable in any meaningful way, and all of it decides whether you experience your house as a finished thing or as a permanent open ticket.

The catch here is that year three is entirely invisible at the hiring stage. Nothing in a portfolio tells you about it. A render tells you what a practice can imagine, and a completed photograph tells you what it can build, but neither tells you what happens when an owner emails eleven months after handover about a leak, and that is precisely the information you most need before you sign.

What actually happens after sanction, and why practices disappear there

There is a structural reason architects go quiet, and it is worth understanding rather than moralising about. A lot of what gets sold in Kolkata as architectural service is really plan-drawing service, priced accordingly and scoped accordingly, where the job is understood by the person doing it to end the day the sanctioned plan is handed across the table. That is a legitimate product at a legitimate price, and the problem is not that it exists, the problem is that owners buy it thinking they have bought something else.

Because sanction is the beginning of the demanding part, not the end of it. Once the plan is approved, the work becomes structural coordination, service routing, waterproofing details, staircase and railing decisions that nobody drew because nobody thought they needed drawing, material approvals, and the slow negotiation between what was designed and what the mason in front of you is actually capable of executing well. Then at the far end of it there is the completion and occupancy process, which has its own document trail and its own reasons for going sideways, and we have written up how that runs in New Town in our guide to the NKDA completion and occupancy certificate because it is the stage owners are least prepared for.

Sumana Kumar, who is the principal architect and owner of our studio, has a fairly blunt way of putting this to prospective clients, which is that the drawing is a promise and the building is the delivery, and you should hire whoever you believe will be there for the delivery. You can read more about how Sumana Kumar approaches a project brief, and her working position has been consistent for over a decade, which is that a practice that treats sanction as the finish line will design differently, and usually worse, than one that knows it will be answering for the building years later.

The questions that actually separate a practice from a plan shop

When an owner asks us how to evaluate an architect, we do not tell them to ask about style, because style is visible and you can judge it yourself. We tell them to ask the questions that expose process, because process is invisible and it is where the risk sits.

That last one does a surprising amount of work. Anyone can produce a happy client from a project that finished last month, because at that point everyone is still glowing. A client from three years ago has had two monsoons, a full summer of running the air conditioning against whatever the envelope actually does, and enough time to discover every detail that was fudged. If a practice cannot comfortably point you at work from three years ago, that is information.

The other question worth pressing on is statutory process, because New Town, Kolkata sits under NKDA while Salt Lake falls under Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation and much of the older city sits under KMC, and the three do not run identically. We take residential and commercial projects through all three sanction processes routinely, and that repetition matters less for speed than for prediction, because when you have seen where files stall you draw differently at concept stage to avoid stalling. Most rejections are not exotic, they are the same handful of issues recurring, which is why we maintain a plain-language breakdown of why building plans get rejected by NKDA rather than treating it as trade secrecy.

Fee structure quietly predicts availability

Here is something we have learned from watching a lot of projects, including projects that came to us broken. The way a fee is structured tells you more about future availability than any assurance in a meeting does, because incentives are honest even when people are not being dishonest.

A single lump sum collected largely up front, with a scope that thins out after sanction, creates a practice that is economically finished with you early, and no amount of goodwill fully survives that. A fee staged against delivery milestones that run all the way through completion keeps someone on the hook when you need them most. Neither is a trick, they are just different products, and the mistake is comparing their headline numbers as though they cover the same thing. We have set out how fees are typically structured in this market in our piece on architect fees in Kolkata, and the useful takeaway there is to compare scope tables line by line before you compare rupee figures.

At the end of the day, the total cost of a house is not the architect fee, it is the architect fee plus everything that goes wrong without one present, and rework on a cast slab is expensive in a way that a design fee never is.

What continuity actually looks like in practice

Continuity is not a promise, it is a set of habits, and it is worth knowing which habits to look for. For us it means one studio holding the whole arc, so residential architecture and the residential interior design that follows it are drawn by people who talk to each other daily, and the electrical layout is not being invented by an interior team eight months after the conduits were cast into a wall by a contractor working off a different set of drawings.

It also means keeping the file. Every project we have delivered since 2014 still exists as a drawing set we can pull up, which sounds like housekeeping until an owner calls needing a stamped drawing for a loan, or a neighbour disputes a boundary line, or a family wants to add a floor a decade later. That archive is also why renovation and remodelling work on buildings we originally designed goes smoothly and why we can be useful even on buildings we did not, and we have written about how prior sanction experience de-risks a renovation in the same neighbourhoods.

And it means designing for the long tail from day one, basically. When you know you will be the one taking the call about a damp patch in year three, you specify waterproofing properly, you detail the terrace parapet junction instead of leaving it to the mason, and you plan the massing against the plot's floor area ratio so that a future addition is possible rather than blocked. Our DE Block residence in New Town is a fair example of a project where those decisions were made early and quietly, and none of them show up in a photograph.

If you are still shortlisting, it is worth reading our overview of what to look for in an architect in New Town, Kolkata and our broader notes on working in New Town, because both are written for the shortlisting stage rather than the selling stage.

So the advice is simple enough to say and hard to act on, which is that you should hire for the tail of the project rather than the front of it. Look at the portfolio, absolutely, but decide on process, on scope, on fee structure, and on whether the practice can show you work that has survived a few years of being lived in. If you are at that stage with a plot in New Town, Salt Lake or anywhere in greater Kolkata and you want to talk it through properly rather than be pitched at, get in touch with the studio and we will walk you through exactly what our scope covers, what it does not, and what we will still be doing for you in year three.