Northern Designs Services

Northern Designs specializes in custom residential design. Making your dream a reality means having a designer with architectural flare and vision, along with the clients constant involvement makes the experience exciting and rewarding.

Many of our clients are building a custom home, cottage, or renovating an existing one for the first time. Often they will have a conceptual layout of ideas and what they want, but left trying to put it together. Northern Designs offers a broad range of consulting services to help you achieve your goals and dreams. These services will take you from the conceptual design stage through detailed architectural plans and into construction. Services that are typically required for a project include:

Northern Designs will make all efforts to have the initial meeting setup to accommodate your schedule. Whether it is at your home, cottage or the proposed building site, we want to help make this experience one you won’t forget. We will discuss the project requirements and services that Northern Designs offers. We will go through your ideas of an interior layout with rooms and spaces, discuss the visual appearance of the exterior façade along with design styles. Together we will come up with an estimated budget and proposed construction date.

In site development we visit the proposed building site to review any existing services, (hydro, septic, water supply), special features with landscaping, driveway entrance and drainage. With all of this information we discuss best possible positions for situating the building on the site.

We will be in contact with the Municipalities building department, Conservation authorities, and health unit to review zoning, by-laws, and stipulations for proposed building location. Northern Designs will take this information and prepare conceptual designs.

If you are required to apply for re-zoning or a minor variance, Northern Designs will prepare all documentation including site plan, conceptual designs, and permit application with the required information. We will also accompany or represent you in the application stage as well as attending the Municipal planning meeting before the committee of adjustment.

This is when we finally put the design into detailed construction plans, which are used for submitting to the municipality for a building permit. If required by the authorities having jurisdiction or in conformance with the building code, you may need to involve engineering such as structural / environmental and land surveyor. These architectural plans will be detailed with all dimensions, material specification, and construction assemblies for you to submit to contractors for quoting and construction. Contractors are required to review plans and verify prior to construction. Any errors, omissions or revisions must be reported to Northern Designs prior to and during construction. The co-operation of all trades in this matter will assure that your home, cottage or renovation is being built to proper standards and specifications of the building code.

Additional services offered by Northern Designs include:

  • Tendering
  • Permits
  • Construction Overview