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You Decided to Build — So You Hired an Architect: Why That's the Second Step, Not the First

Most commercial projects in our region begin the same way: an owner decides to build, then hires an architect. It feels like the natural first step. It is actually the second — and starting there is why so many projects end up beautiful, expensive, and commercially unconvincing.

Design answers a brief. Who writes the brief?

An architect's job is to solve the problem they are given. If the brief says "a commercial building on this plot," that is what gets designed. Nobody in that arrangement is responsible for asking whether this plot should hold a commercial building at all, which tenant categories it must serve, what floor plates those tenants require, or what the market will pay per square meter when it opens.

Development advisory is the discipline that writes the brief — the commercial thinking that precedes the drawing.

What planning covers before design begins

  • Use and concept: what the project is, for whom, and why here — confirmed against demand, not assumed.

  • Commercial brief: target tenant categories and the physical requirements they impose — floor plates, ceiling heights, service access, extraction, loading.

  • Financial frame: the construction budget the projected income can actually support, set before the design creates expectations it cannot fund.

  • Regulatory path: zoning, permitted uses, licensing sequence, and approval timelines built into the plan from day one.

  • Phasing: what opens first, what follows, and how the project stays financeable in between.

The three sequences that cost the most

  • Design before demand. The layout gets fixed, then leasing discovers the units are the wrong size for the tenants who would actually come.

  • Budget after design. By the time cost exceeds capacity, the owner is cutting quality from a scheme he already loves — the most painful form of value engineering.

  • Leasing after construction. Anchors negotiate hardest with a finished building, because the owner has no leverage left and rent is already burning.

Advisory is not another layer of cost

Owners often hesitate here: another consultant, another fee. But planning advisory is measured against what it prevents — redesign cycles, mis-sized units, permits discovered late, and rent lost to delay. On most projects, one avoided redesign covers the advisory cost several times over. It is the cheapest stage at which decisions can still change anything.

Across the Levant, Egypt, Turkey, and the Gulf, the volume of new commercial development is rising fast. The projects that will perform are not the ones that started drawing earliest — they are the ones that started thinking earliest.

A note from the field

In the projects we have advised on across the Levant and the Gulf, the pattern repeats: when the commercial brief comes first, design becomes faster and cheaper, because the architect finally has clear constraints to solve for. That is the work we do at RETAILBIG — writing the commercial brief and holding the sequence, so the drawings serve the investment. You can read how we work on our About page.

Planning a development and unsure what to decide first? Send us a brief and receive a complimentary 15–30 minute consultation: Contact RETAILBIG

Images: Pexels (free to use) — photos by Alena Darmel, Maren Ferraro, and Mikhail Nilov.

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