Most business owners planning their first commercial build have no idea what to expect from the design process. They know they need drawings. They are not sure how long it takes, what they need to provide, or when the major decision points happen. They sometimes do not realize that the process starts long before anyone draws a line.
This guide walks through every phase of the commercial design process — what happens, how long it takes, what you need to do, and what goes wrong when phases are rushed or skipped.
The most important thing that happens before the formal design process begins is site selection — and it is where many business owners make their most expensive mistake.
Signing a lease or purchasing a property before consulting an architect means committing to a space without knowing whether it can accommodate your program, whether the zoning allows your use, whether the building’s structural and mechanical systems are adequate, or whether hidden regulatory requirements will complicate or prevent the project you have in mind.
A pre-design feasibility review is a relatively low-cost engagement — a few hours of an architect’s time — that can answer all of those questions before you sign anything. In Asheville specifically, that review should include zoning confirmation, historic district status, flood zone designation, and slope assessment. Our overview of commercial architecture services in Asheville explains what a full feasibility review covers and why it matters before any commitment is made.
Finding those issues before you sign a five-year lease costs almost nothing. Finding them after costs everything.
Duration: 3–4 weeks Fee allocation: ~5% of total architectural fee
Once you have engaged an architect, the first formal phase is pre-design. This is where the architect learns your business, your program requirements, and your site before any design work begins.
Pre-design includes a site visit — or multiple visits — to observe existing conditions, document the space, and assess the site against your goals. For new construction sites, this means evaluating topography, orientation, solar access, views, stormwater patterns, and utility connections. For renovation projects, it means documenting existing structural systems, MEP infrastructure, and building envelope conditions.
Programming is the parallel activity: translating your business operations into spatial requirements. How many seats does your restaurant need? How much back-of-house? What adjacencies matter? For an office, how many workstations, conference rooms, and what is the relationship between collaborative and focused work? The deliverable from pre-design is typically a written program and a confirmed project budget — the first honest look at whether your aspirations and your resources are aligned.
Duration: 4–8 weeks Fee allocation: 15–20% of total architectural fee
Schematic design is where the project takes physical form for the first time. The architect develops conceptual floor plans, building massing, site plans, and preliminary elevations. For renovation projects, this phase establishes the design approach to the existing building — what changes, what stays, and how the new work relates to what is already there.
The goal of schematic design is not a finished design — it is a tested one. Multiple layout options may be explored in early schematic to confirm the right approach before investing in detailed development. Changes at this phase are fast and cheap: moving a wall on a schematic plan takes minutes. The same change during construction documentation, or after permits are issued, costs significantly more.
Schematic design also produces a preliminary cost estimate, typically accurate within ±20%. This is not a contractor’s bid — it is an order-of-magnitude check to confirm scope and budget are aligned before proceeding into more detailed work. If the preliminary estimate is significantly above budget, schematic design is the right time to adjust scope.
Duration: 8–12 weeks Fee allocation: 20–25% of total architectural fee
Design development refines the schematic design into a fully coordinated, dimensioned set of drawings. This is where the design gets detailed and where the engineering disciplines become fully involved.
During design development, the structural engineer designs the building’s structural system and begins producing structural drawings. The mechanical, electrical, and plumbing (MEP) engineers design their respective systems and coordinate those systems with the architectural design. On restaurant projects, the kitchen consultant finalizes equipment layouts and coordinates with the MEP team. Our restaurant and hospitality architecture guide covers the kitchen coordination process in detail, including health department plan review requirements that need to be incorporated at this phase.
On brewery projects, the glycol system, floor drainage, and fermentation ventilation get designed in this phase. Our brewery and taproom architecture guide explains the full technical coordination involved in brewery design development.
The architect manages all of that coordination in a shared BIM model, using Revit to catch conflicts between disciplines before they become field problems. Design development also locks in material and finish selections, which allows a more accurate cost estimate — typically within ±10–15% of final construction cost.
Duration: 8–16 weeks Fee allocation: 35–40% of total architectural fee
Construction documents are the full working drawing set — everything the contractor needs to build the project and the jurisdiction needs to issue a permit. This is the most labor-intensive phase and the one that carries the most downstream value.
A complete commercial construction document set includes architectural drawings (floor plans, reflected ceiling plans, exterior elevations, building sections, wall sections, details, door and window schedules, finish schedules, interior elevations, millwork drawings, accessibility compliance plans), structural drawings stamped by a licensed structural engineer, MEP drawings each stamped by a licensed engineer in that discipline, civil drawings stamped by a licensed civil engineer as required, and specifications that describe the quality of materials, equipment, and construction methods.
The specifications are as important as the drawings. They define the quality of materials and workmanship required, not just what goes where. A contractor can interpret drawings in multiple ways; specifications close those gaps and protect the project budget from substitutions that look equivalent on paper but perform differently in use.
The quality of construction documents determines the quality of contractor bids. Complete, coordinated documents produce accurate, competitive bids. Incomplete documents produce bids full of assumptions that become change orders. Change orders from inadequate documentation typically add 3–5% to total construction cost — often exceeding the cost difference between minimal and thorough documents. Understanding what thorough architectural documents are worth relative to their cost puts this phase in financial perspective.
Duration: 4–12 weeks (longer for complex projects or historic review)
Once construction documents are complete, the permit package is submitted to the jurisdiction. In Asheville, commercial permits are submitted online through the City’s Development Portal or at the Permit Application Center on S. Charlotte Street.
The standard commercial permit review checks the drawings for IBC code compliance, fire and life safety, structural adequacy, accessibility, and energy code compliance. Plan reviewers from multiple departments — building, fire, planning, zoning — may review the package independently, and any one of them can issue comments that require a response before the permit is issued.
Asheville has several permitting layers that add time if you are not prepared for them. Historic Resources Commission review is required for projects within Asheville’s four local historic districts — Biltmore Village, Montford, Albemarle Park, and St. Dunstan’s. HRC meets monthly, so a project that misses one meeting waits until the next. Steep slope review applies to properties with grades of 36% or more, requiring a geotechnical analysis by a licensed NC engineer before a permit can be issued. Post-Helene flood standards now mandate elevated mechanical and electrical systems in low-lying areas near waterways. The Asheville commercial architecture market guide covers all of these regulatory layers with the specifics business owners need to plan around them.
A pre-application meeting with city staff is strongly recommended for any project with regulatory complexity. It identifies potential issues before documents are submitted and saves time in the review cycle.
Duration: 3–6 weeks
Once permits are issued, construction documents go out to bid. The architect prepares the bid package — a complete set of documents plus bid instructions, scope clarifications, and addenda as needed — and distributes it to a qualified list of general contractors.
Competitive bidding with complete documents produces accurate, comparable prices. Contractors bid the same scope from the same drawings, which means the numbers are actually comparable. The architect reviews the bids, identifies any scope gaps or qualifications that affect comparability, and prepares a bid tabulation for the owner’s review.
Price is one factor in contractor selection; experience with similar project types, communication style, and references from previous clients are equally important. Our page on why to hire a commercial architect instead of a general contractor covers the bidding process and why the architect’s role in that selection matters for project outcomes. Form & Function has worked with Asheville’s contractor community since 2010 and knows who does good work on which project types.
Duration: The full length of construction (typically 4–18 months depending on project size) Fee allocation: 15–20% of total architectural fee
Construction administration begins when the contractor mobilizes and continues through certificate of occupancy. This is where the investment in good documents pays off — and where shortcuts in earlier phases show up as problems.
During construction administration, the architect conducts regular site visits to confirm the work matches the drawings and specifications, reviews shop drawings and product submittals from subcontractors to confirm they meet the design intent before materials are ordered or installed, responds to requests for information (RFIs) from the contractor with written clarifications that become binding project record documents, reviews and processes change orders, reviews contractor payment applications to confirm the work billed has actually been completed, manages the punch list, and coordinates the certificate of occupancy inspection and system commissioning.
Construction administration is worth every dollar for complex commercial projects. Some business owners opt for reduced construction administration to reduce fees. That choice transfers the oversight burden to the owner and frequently costs more in change orders and corrections than it saves in fees. Whether to include full construction administration in your scope is worth discussing when you are evaluating what commercial architectural services should cost for your project.
Signing a lease before a feasibility review. The most common and expensive mistake. A pre-design consultation is relatively low-cost. A five-year lease on a space that cannot accommodate your program is not.
Starting design before the budget is confirmed. Design takes significant time and money. If the project is not financeable at the budget required, that needs to be known in schematic design, not after construction documents are complete.
Rushing construction documents to save time. Incomplete documents produce unpredictable bids and guaranteed change orders. The time saved in document production is almost always lost in bid negotiation and field problem-solving.
Skipping construction administration. The design is what you intended. Construction administration is what confirms you got it. Projects without it frequently end up with materials, finishes, or construction conditions that do not match the design — and discovering that after occupancy is much more expensive than catching it during construction.
Underestimating soft costs. Architectural fees, engineering fees, permit fees, geotechnical investigation, testing and inspections, and specialty consultants typically add 15–20% on top of hard construction costs. Many first-time owners budget only for construction and are surprised by the total.
If you are also evaluating whether to pursue a traditional delivery or design-build arrangement, the phases above apply primarily to traditional delivery. Our comparison of design-build vs. traditional architecture explains how the phases shift in a design-build context.
It depends heavily on project scale and regulatory complexity. A small restaurant build-out in Asheville might run six to ten months total from first architect meeting to opening. A mid-size new construction commercial project typically runs eighteen to thirty months. Projects in Asheville’s historic districts or requiring rezoning run longer because of the hearing and review timelines. We provide a realistic project-specific timeline estimate during pre-design.
Schematic design is the phase where the project concept is developed and tested. It produces preliminary floor plans, elevations, and a rough cost estimate — enough to confirm the design approach is right before investing in detailed work. Changes made during schematic design are fast and cheap. The same changes made during construction documents, or after permits are issued, cost significantly more. Schematic design is where the project’s direction gets set.
Construction documents are the complete working drawing set — architectural drawings plus stamped structural, mechanical, electrical, and plumbing engineering, plus written specifications for every material and system. They take four to sixteen weeks for typical commercial projects because they require coordination across multiple licensed engineering disciplines, detailed documentation of every system and material, and production of a set comprehensive enough that a contractor can build the project without calling the architect every day.
If your project is within one of Asheville’s four local historic districts — Biltmore Village, Montford, Albemarle Park, or St. Dunstan’s — all exterior changes require HRC review and approval before a building permit is issued. HRC meets monthly. Projects that miss the submission deadline for a given meeting wait until the following month. An architect familiar with the district’s design standards designs for approval from the start, which minimizes revision cycles and delays.
Hidden conditions behind walls and under floors — existing structural framing, outdated MEP systems, previous renovation work, moisture damage — are common in Asheville’s older commercial building stock. Well-coordinated construction documents include allowances and contingencies for these conditions. During construction administration, the architect assesses discovered conditions, issues written clarifications to address them, and manages any associated scope changes.
Before you select a space. Pre-design feasibility — reviewing a potential lease space or property against your program, zoning, and budget — is one of the most valuable services we offer and one of the least utilized. The questions a feasibility review answers are exactly the ones that prevent expensive mistakes in site selection.
The certificate of occupancy (CO) is the final permit issued by the jurisdiction confirming the building is safe for its intended use. The CO inspection typically involves building, fire, and sometimes health department inspectors reviewing the completed space against the permitted drawings. The architect coordinates the inspection, manages any punch list items the inspector requires, and certifies substantial completion so the CO can be issued. Occupying a commercial space without a CO is a significant legal and insurance risk.
The commercial design process is longer and more layered than most business owners expect — and that is not inefficiency, it is the work required to produce a building that is code-compliant, well-coordinated, accurately bid, and built to what was designed.
The business owners who get the best outcomes are the ones who engage an architect early, invest in thorough construction documents, stay involved through construction administration, and budget realistically for the full scope of professional services.
Form & Function Architecture has guided commercial clients through this process in Asheville since 2010, across restaurants, breweries, offices, wellness studios, healthcare facilities, and more. Contact our studio to discuss your project and what a realistic process looks like for your specific scope.
