Every construction project has a moment where the drawings leave the person who drew them and arrive with the person who has to build them. That transfer is the handover gap, and it is where a surprising share of cost and delay is created.

It is rarely dramatic. A detail is drawn at a scale that does not resolve how two materials actually meet. A structural change agreed on site is never fed back into the architectural set. A finish is specified that is no longer available in the size drawn. None of these are anyone acting in bad faith. They are the ordinary friction of two organisations reading the same paper differently.

The cost shows up in three ways. Time, while somebody establishes what was intended. Money, when the resolution is a variation rather than a decision. And quality, when the site is under pressure and picks the interpretation that is quickest rather than the one that was meant.

Holding design and construction in the same studio does not make a project immune to any of this. What it removes is the negotiation. When the question is what did we mean here, the person who meant it is on the same team, and the answer takes an afternoon rather than a claim.

That is the honest case for it, and it is narrower than the usual pitch. We also work design only, and we also build to other architects’ drawings, and both are perfectly good ways to run a project. But if you have ever sat between an architect and a contractor while they explain why the other one is wrong, you already know exactly what the gap costs.