What’s included in your design & construct service?

We manage the full design, approvals, and construction process under one contract for speed and clarity.

Can you work with my architect?

Yes. We can integrate with external consultants or provide in-house design coordination.

What are the cost benefits?

Bundling services allows early cost planning and reduces admin overhead and delays.

Commercial · design and construction

One contract for the design and the building.

Design and construct, and novated design and construct, for commercial projects across South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales. One party answerable for whether the drawings and the building agree.

Contract covering design and delivery

$20m

Project capacity under a single contract

States we build in: South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales

100%

Of design decisions recorded against your brief, in writing

What it actually transfers

Design and construct moves one specific risk. Be clear about which one.

It is not a discount and it is not a shortcut. It is a decision about who pays when the drawings and the building disagree.

Under a traditional contract you hold the consultants and you hold the builder, so the gap between what was drawn and what can be built is yours. Under design and construct that gap moves to the contractor, along with the obligation to deliver a building that meets your brief.

Which means your brief is doing far more work than most clients realise. Under a traditional contract, the drawings define the building. Under design and construct, your brief defines the building, and the drawings are the contractor’s means of satisfying it. A brief that says “high quality finishes” has said nothing enforceable at all.

Three structures, and where the risk of a design that cannot be built sits in each. The middle and right structures both transfer it; they differ in whether you get to develop the design first and keep the team that did it.

Timing

Why the model has to be chosen early.

Control over the outcome falls away long before the money does.

The decision about which procurement model to use is itself an early decision, and it gets harder to reverse every week it is deferred. By tender the design is documented, the consultants are appointed and the options have narrowed to the one that fits what already exists.

The influence curve, used across the industry to explain why an hour spent at concept is worth a week spent at tender. It is a shape rather than measured data, and every project sits at a different point on it.

Which model

A decision tree, not a preference.

Four routes, and the two questions that separate them. We will tell you which one we think suits your project rather than which one suits us.

The brief

We would rather write it with you than be handed a weak one.

A vague brief hands the contractor latitude, and different contractors will use it differently. All of them legitimately. We would rather spend a week making the brief specific, because a specific brief is the client’s protection and it also removes the arguments we would otherwise be having in month six.

Performance, not products, where you canState the outcome. Acoustic separation between these two rooms, this illuminance at this working plane, this many people at this density. Then the contractor is answerable for the result rather than for having installed the named item.
Products, not performance, where you mustWhere a specific finish, system or manufacturer genuinely matters, name it. Mixing the two deliberately is normal. Mixing them accidentally is where disputes start.
The things you will not acceptExclusions are as informative as inclusions, and easier to write.
The standards that apply, and which editionIncluding any client standard, landlord requirement or corporate guideline that sits above the Code.
Who approves what, and how long they getA brief without a decision timetable transfers a programme risk back to you the first time someone is on leave.
What happens at handoverCommissioning, training, warranties, as-builts and the data set you want. Write it into the brief and it is priced. Ask for it at completion and it is a variation.

Under design and construct, your brief is the building. The drawings are only how we get there.

Completed workplace · library image

Novation

How to keep the design you wanted and still transfer the risk.

What happens

You appoint the architect and consultants, develop the design to an agreed point, then transfer those appointments to the contractor, who completes the documentation and builds it.

Why institutions prefer it

The design intent is developed by a team answerable to you, at the stage where the important decisions are made. After novation, the contractor owns the outcome.

The point everyone gets wrong

The consultant’s duty changes at novation. From that day their client is the contractor, not you. Clients who keep instructing a novated consultant directly are creating a claim against themselves.

What protects you afterwards

The design that existed at novation, and how tightly it was documented. That drawing set becomes the benchmark for what the contractor has to deliver, so the moment of novation is worth taking seriously.

Our position

We will take a novated team and work with them properly. We will also tell you before you novate if we think the design is not developed far enough for the transfer to protect you.

Regulation

New South Wales changed what design and construct means.

The design and building practitioner regime in New South Wales requires designs for certain building work to be declared by a registered practitioner, and requires the builder to declare that the work was built to those declared designs. It applies before construction starts, not at completion.

The practical effect on a design and construct contract is significant: design cannot be informally developed on site the way it once was, because the declared design is the reference. It rewards contractors who document properly, and we would rather work under it than around it.

Questions

Is design and construct cheaper?

Not inherently. It is more certain earlier, which is a different and often more valuable thing. A contractor pricing a brief prices the risk in that brief. A vague brief is priced with contingency, and you pay for it either way.

Can we still choose the finishes?

Yes, if the brief says so. Nominate them, or set a prime cost or provisional sum with a selection date. What does not work is assuming a standard that was never written down.

What if we already have a design?

Then novation is probably the right structure. We can also price a traditional contract against a completed design set. We will tell you which we think suits your project rather than which suits us.

Who carries the design professional indemnity?

The consultants carry theirs, and the contractor carries its own design liability under the contract. The interaction is worth having your lawyer look at, particularly after novation.

How developed does the design need to be before you can price it?

Far less than most people expect, if the brief is good. Far more than most people expect, if it is not.

Bring us the brief, even a rough one.

We will tell you where it is doing enough work and where it is leaving you exposed, before anyone tenders anything.

Submit a project brief