Offsite is based in Brooklyn and works wherever the project is, as designer and owner's rep on the same job - which mostly means there is one person answering for the drawings and for the number, and that the answer doesn't change when the work moves off paper and onto the site.
Owners
One house, built once, and it has to be right.
You get a designer and an owner's rep in the same room, which mostly means there is one person answering for the drawings and for the number, and you are not the one translating between them.
Developers
Several projects, and a schedule that has to hold.
We work at the front of the deal, where the drawings, the approvals and the cost are still moving, and we stay on through construction so the thing that gets built is the thing that got priced.
Investors
Capital committed against a building you will not manage.
You get the underwriting and the design from the same team, so the returns are modelled off a real drawing set and a real cost, rather than off a per-square-foot number that stops being true the moment anyone draws anything.
01 Feasibility
What the zoning allows, what will physically fit and what the whole thing costs to build, put together early enough that the answer can still change the plan. Well, septic, perc test, driveway, clearing and power are the costs that decide whether a project works at all, and they are the ones a price per square foot leaves out.
02 Design
We size the rooms at the scale they will actually get used at, and we model the building in 3D so you are deciding from something you can see rather than from a plan you need training to read. Most of the decisions that matter get made in this stage and are expensive to revisit after it.
03 Building science
Orientation, envelope, glazing and all-electric mechanicals, modelled before anything is ordered, because that is the stage where how a building performs actually gets decided. Siting and a tight envelope do most of the work before a system is switched on, and the systems close what is left, in that order, because it is the order that keeps the running costs down.
04 Permitting
We put the submission together, go to the planning board, and keep the calendar honest about what a variance really adds. Offsite has taken a site through a rezoning and a zoning text amendment, which is about the far end of what a municipality will entertain and not something most projects should need.
05 Construction
We assemble the bid package, help you pick a contractor and stay on through construction, answering the questions that come up once the excavator is already there, which is where a set of drawings either holds up or turns into a run of phone calls.
06 Software
Custom software for your firm, to help with your projects and integrated into the way you already work rather than in place of it. This is the same practice that produced Aldo, pointed at somebody else's problem instead of ours - and the reason we can do it at all is that we run projects too, so the tool gets built by people who will have to live with it.
Designing buildings and writing software are not usually the same business, and keeping both is a deliberate choice rather than a diversification. The tools that were available price a building by the square foot, and nobody builds a square foot; we wanted something that knew what a particular site allowed and what a particular assembly cost, so we built it, and it now sits underneath every project we run.
The point of that precision is not to industrialise the work. There is a version of this where the technology replaces the person, and it tends to produce buildings that are cheap to make and joyless to be in, which is not the trade we are making. Modelling the envelope and the cost early is how the money gets allocated before anyone has to defend a handrail, so the parts of a building somebody actually made are still in the drawings by the time the trades arrive.
We are not a licensed architecture or engineering firm. On a project that needs a stamped drawing we bring in an architect or an engineer to provide it, and we tell you that at the start rather than at the point where the building department is asking for it.
The rest of it - the feasibility work, the design, the permitting, the bidding and the construction administration - is ours, and it is most of what a project needs.
Brian Vallario started Offsite after years as a designer at architecture firms in New York City. The research side of that work was traditional in the way most of the industry still is: figuring out what a site would allow meant pulling the code books off the shelf and reading them, which is slow, and which is hard to justify on a project that might not go ahead. The firms were good ones and leaving had nothing to do with them; he wanted to run his own projects.
The clearest version of why this studio works the way it does came from a client who kept arriving with ideas and a badly distorted sense of what they would cost. There was no feasibility study, so we ran one, mostly to get the conversation back onto what was actually possible - and that turned out to be the whole job, or at least the part of it that decides everything after.
We also keep a cabin up in Wassaic and run it as an artist residency. It isn't a business line, just a place we hold onto, though having had to operate a building does change how you go about drawing one.
Aldo is our in-house development platform. It is an operating system for residential construction that keeps everyone involved aligned and working from the same information: it reads zoning at the parcel level, prices the build and tracks the permitting. Unlike the studio, it is bounded by its data - the zoning covers 15 counties and 363 municipalities in the Hudson Valley today, and grows a county at a time.
You can use it on your own, or we'll manage your project for you.
Tell us what you are working on and we will tell you what we think, before anyone has signed anything.
Start a project