Architecture
House plans for Zimbabwean stands.
You own the stand. You know roughly what you want. What you need is a set of drawings you can actually build from, at a price that leaves something in the budget for the building.
The fastest route from a stand to a building
Most people who own a stand in Zimbabwe are not short of ideas. They are short of a drawing set a builder can price accurately and a council will accept.
That is a smaller job than a full custom design and it should cost less. A ready-made plan adapted to your stand does most of what a bespoke design does, for a fraction of the fee, as long as the stand is a reasonable shape and the house you want is close to something that already exists.
Where that stops being true, we say so, because a ready plan needing twenty changes costs more than a custom design and takes longer.
Two ways to get plans
A ready-made plan
A design that already exists, drawn to work on a standard stand. The fastest and cheapest route, because the design work is already done. You pick a plan that fits your family and your budget, we adapt it to your specific stand and orientation, and you build.
A custom plan
Drawn for your site and your brief from the start. It costs more and takes longer, and it is the right answer when the stand is awkward, the slope is serious, the view is worth designing around, or the way you want to live does not fit a standard layout.
What you get
- Floor plans for every level, dimensioned
- Elevations on all sides
- Sections
- A full set of council submission drawings
- Adaptation to your stand and its orientation
- Two rounds of revisions
What it costs
- Ready-made plan Adapted to your stand and orientation
- from $180
- Custom home design Drawn for your site and brief from the start
- $320 to $1,200
Starting prices. Final quote after a free consultation.
30% deposit before work starts, 70% on completion. Files and access are released on payment in full.
How long it takes
A ready-made plan adapted to your stand is usually a week or less. A custom design is concept in under two weeks and a full drawing set in about four.
What we need from you
Four things, and you probably have three of them already.
- The stand number and, if you have it, the survey diagram
- Photographs of the stand, including the slope and the neighbours
- How many bedrooms and bathrooms, and how many people will live there
- Your budget for the build, not just for the drawings
Browse the plan library
Ready-made plans with the full drawing set, filterable by bedrooms, bathrooms, floor area and price.
Common questions
Can I change a ready-made plan?
Within reason, yes, and adapting it to your stand and orientation is included in the price. Bigger changes, moving walls, adding rooms, changing the roof, are quoted as extra drawing work. At a certain point it becomes cheaper to start with a custom design, and we will say so rather than billing you twice.
Will these plans be approved?
We prepare a complete, correct set of council submission drawings, and we help you deal with council queries when they come up. What we will not do is promise you an approval or a date. Council decisions and council turnaround are outside our control and are genuinely hard to predict, and anyone who guarantees either is telling you something they cannot know. What we can promise is that the drawings will not be the reason for a problem, and that we will still be here when one comes up.
Can I use these plans for a bank or a builder's quote?
Yes, and it is worth more than most people expect. The drawing set has what a builder needs to price the job accurately, and it is accepted for bank submissions. Vague drawings are how quotes come back wildly different, and how disputes start halfway through a build.
Start here
Tell us what you want to build
A house, a brand, a website, a system, or all of it. Send a message and we will map out the path from idea to reality.