Sumana Kumar on What an Architect Owes a Client After Handover

Most people choosing an architect in Kolkata are, quite reasonably, thinking about the part they can picture, which is the elevation, the layout, the staircase, the kitchen, and the day the house is finished and the family walks in. That is the exciting part and nobody should apologise for wanting it. The catch here is that the day the family walks in is roughly the halfway mark of the relationship, and almost nobody asks about the second half at the enquiry stage, so almost nobody finds out what their architect actually intends to do once the scaffolding comes down.

We have been running our studio out of New Town since 2014 and we have delivered 330+ buildings across New Town, Salt Lake, Rajarhat and greater Kolkata, and if there is one thing that separates the projects clients still talk about warmly from the ones that go quiet, it is not the design, it is what happened in the eighteen months after handover. The paperwork that either got closed or did not. The first monsoon, which either passed uneventfully or did not. The phone call that either got picked up or did not.

So this piece is our principal architect Sumana Kumar setting out, plainly, what we think an architect owes a client after the keys change hands, and what you as a plot owner in New Town, Salt Lake or Kolkata should be asking for in writing before you sign anything. Read it as a checklist you can hold any studio to, ours included.

Handover is a date on a calendar, not the end of the job

There is a habit in the market of treating handover as a finish line, where the final payment clears, the drawings folder gets emailed, and the architect quietly stops answering within a week. It works commercially for the studio and it is terrible for the client, because a building is not a product that leaves the factory finished, it is an assembly of concrete, plaster, waterproofing, plumbing, wiring and joinery that behaves slightly differently once it is occupied, heated by real bodies, loaded with real furniture and drained by real rainfall, so the first year of occupation is genuinely part of the build.

Our view is that the design fee buys you a building and a witness, right, someone who knows why the sunken slab in the second-floor toilet was detailed the way it was, why that beam sits where it sits, and which contractor laid which layer, because in eighteen months when a damp patch appears on a ceiling, that memory is worth more than any amount of fresh inspection. If your architect has no intention of being that witness, you are buying a set of drawings, and you should price it accordingly.

The paperwork that outlives the building work

Physical completion and legal completion are two different events in this city and they are rarely on the same date, which surprises a lot of first-time owners. You can be living in the house while the file is still open, and an open file has a way of surfacing years later when you go to sell, to mortgage, or to add a floor. Our studio takes residential and commercial projects through the NKDA, KMC and Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation building-plan sanction processes as a matter of routine, and that working familiarity matters most not at the sanction stage, which everyone competes on, but at the closing stage, which almost nobody advertises.

The sequence after physical completion generally runs through completion and occupancy documentation and then through mutation and property assessment, and each of those steps wants the as-built condition to match the sanctioned drawing, which is exactly where projects come unstuck, because somewhere in month nine somebody enclosed a balcony or moved a wall by two feet without asking. We walk clients through the NKDA completion and occupancy certificate route and then through mutation and property assessment in New Town, and separately we keep a running occupancy certificate documents checklist because the single biggest cause of delay we see is a missing paper that could have been collected on site a year earlier for free.

For instance, a photograph of the underground water reservoir before backfilling, or the plinth-level waterproofing before the floor went down, costs nothing on the day and is impossible to recreate later, so our site team collects that material as standard and it lands in the client's handover file rather than dying on somebody's phone. Same logic applies to the sanction stage documentation, and we keep a plain-language note on the documents required for NKDA building sanction so owners can start assembling their side early instead of scrambling at the counter.

The first monsoon is the real inspection

Everything a building is going to tell you about its detailing, it tells you in its first monsoon. Kolkata does not test a building gently, and a parapet junction, a terrace slope, a window sill drip, a sunken slab or a boundary-wall coping that was executed casually will announce itself in the first heavy week, usually as a stain rather than a leak, which is why so many owners miss it until the second year when the plaster starts blowing.

So we go back. A site visit during or immediately after the first proper spell of rain is, in our practice, part of the job rather than a favour, because we want to see the building wet with the people who built it still contactable and still accountable. Waterproofing failures caught in year one are a contractor rectification, and the same failure caught in year four is a full-scale repair job at the owner's cost, and the difference between those two outcomes is nothing more than whether somebody bothered to look.

The other honest thing to say here is that some of what appears in year one is not a defect at all, it is normal behaviour of the material. Hairline shrinkage cracks in plaster over a reinforced concrete frame are common and mostly cosmetic, minor door swelling in high humidity is expected, and a good architect will tell you which is which rather than either dismissing everything as normal or alarming you into unnecessary work. That judgement call is the thing you are actually paying for.

The defects window, and behaving well inside it

There is usually a defect liability period agreed with the contractor, and the value of that clause depends entirely on whether somebody with technical authority is willing to invoke it on your behalf. Left to the owner alone, it tends to become a WhatsApp argument between a homeowner who is upset and a contractor who is busy, and it goes nowhere. With the architect in the room, it becomes a documented observation, a cause, a proposed rectification and a date, which contractors respond to very differently.

We think the studio's duty here is uncomfortable by design. The contractor is often someone we have worked with repeatedly and will work with again, and it would be commercially easier to soften a finding, but the client paid us to protect their interest and not our supply chain, so the finding goes in as it is. That is the whole basis of the relationship, at the end of the day, and any studio that will not put an inconvenient defect in writing is not really representing you.

The handover file you should insist on

A lot of grief later comes down to one boring thing, which is that nobody kept the papers. When you eventually renovate, sell, refinance or add a floor, the questions asked are all answerable from a file that takes an afternoon to assemble at handover and is nearly impossible to reconstruct five years later. We hand over a physical and digital set and we keep a copy in the studio archive, and that archive has bailed out more than one client whose own copy went missing in a house move.

That last row is not a throwaway. Years later, when a client comes back to us for a renovation or remodelling job on a house we built, the work is faster and cheaper because we already know what is inside the walls, and that continuity is a large part of why experience with a building de-risks its renovation. It is also why we are candid with owners of buildings we did not design that the first phase of any renovation is investigation, not demolition.

What to agree before you sign, so the after is already settled

Everything above is easy to promise and easy to forget, so put it in the appointment letter. Ask for the post-handover scope to be written as a period, a list of inclusions, a defined number of visits and a named person, and ask what falls outside it and what that costs, because a studio that can price its after-service honestly is a studio that has actually planned to deliver it. In our residential architecture engagements the closing-out work is written into the scope from day one rather than treated as goodwill, and the same holds when we carry a project through to interiors, where the furniture, joinery and services all carry their own warranties that somebody has to keep track of.

You can also just look at the evidence. Ask any studio to point you at a house they finished three or four years ago and to tell you what happened to it since, and listen to whether they know. When we walk a prospective client through something like our DE Block residence in New Town, the part we find ourselves talking about is rarely the elevation, it is how the terrace has held up, what the owner changed after living in it, and what we would detail differently now, because that is the only kind of proof that means anything.

If you are about to appoint an architect for a plot in New Town, Salt Lake, Rajarhat or anywhere in greater Kolkata, take this list into the meeting and ask the after-handover questions before you ask about the elevation, and if you would like to have that conversation with us, get in touch with the studio and we will tell you exactly what we cover after the keys change hands, in writing, before you commit to anything.