Saraiva + Associados, the largest architecture office in Portugal, designs the client's experience of a project as carefully as the building itself, and calls the result comfortable architecture.
Saraiva + Associados designs the client’s experience of a project with the same care it designs the building. The practice calls it comfortable architecture. Ziggu is built on the same premise: the process is part of what you deliver.
Comfortable architecture is the name Saraiva + Associados gives to a process a client experiences as comfortably as the finished building. It is not about soft furnishings. It is about the journey from first sketch to handover.
“It’s not just what we do. It’s how we do it.” The line is printed on a notebook the practice hands out, and it is also how the office states its own case: “That’s what sets us apart. That’s what brings you comfort.” Ziggu co-founder Vincent Van Impe met the team and came back with the notebook and the idea.
The practice was founded in 1996 by Miguel Saraiva, works from its headquarters in Lisbon, and has offices in nine countries.
Saraiva + Associados describes its role as guiding clients through a project instead of reacting to them. Anticipation is the method: the client is told what happens next, what is expected of them, and what has already been decided, before they have to ask.
The practice puts the job as “having teams that advise and guide you in every step, corner, or alley”, and sets that out on its comfort page. In the conversation with Ziggu the team put it more plainly: “Our process aims to bring comfort.”
It sounds modest. In a sector where a client’s main experience of a project is waiting for an answer, it is not.
Comfort here is specific. A client who knows which decision is coming next can prepare for it. A client who can see the current drawing does not ask for it. A client who has a record of what was agreed does not have to trust anyone’s memory, including their own.
That is a design problem, and an architecture practice already knows how to solve design problems. It has the same shape as circulation in a building: work out where people will be, what they will need there, and remove the obstacles before they arrive.
The practice treats the client as a participant in the project instead of an audience for it. Most offices skip that, and it costs them twice: once in the meetings that explain what already happened, and once in the goodwill spent on preventable surprises.
Client experience in a building project fails in the same four places every time: information scattered across inboxes, clients asking for updates or resending documents that were lost, confusion about what was approved and when, and decisions buried in threads and spreadsheets.
The four share a cause. The project’s information lives in the private inboxes of everyone involved, so nobody holds the whole picture and everyone reconstructs their own.
None of that is a design failure. All of it lands on the design team anyway.
Trust is what erodes, and it erodes quietly. A client who has chased the same document twice starts checking everything else too. Rebuilding that costs more than preventing it.
| Aspect | A process nobody designed | A process designed on purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Information | Spread across the inboxes of everyone involved | One file per project |
| Updates | The client asks | The client can look |
| Documents | Versions side by side, folder hunting | Current version on top, with a read history |
| Approvals | Remembered afterwards | Recorded with a name and a date |
| Surprises | Handled when they arrive | Anticipated before they arrive |
Three principles turn the idea into practice, and each one changes what an architecture practice sends out.
Do not think only about handover. Think about the handover experience: the walk-through, the documents, the first month of living with the result.
Do not only send documents. Help clients understand them. Context beats completeness, and an annotated plan does more than a perfect drawing nobody can read.
Do not only fix problems. Prevent them, by keeping clients informed, involved and told in advance. Anticipation is what removes anxiety.
A designed process needs somewhere to live, and email is not it. What comfortable architecture asks for is a client portal: one place where the project’s information sits, open to the client as well as to the practice.
Ziggu gives an architecture practice one file per project. Inside it, conversations are split by topic and by who is involved, so a permit question is not filed next to a supplier quote. The document library shows the current version at the top, with a record of who opened it, which is what keeps a contractor off an outdated plan.
Approvals are the part that pays for itself. A material choice, a change order or a finished drawing goes to the client as a question, and the answer is kept with a name and a date. An agreement someone remembers and an agreement that stands are not the same thing.
The client side is the point. Milestones show which phase is finished and what comes next, project news and finances sit alongside them, and the client keeps access for years after completion, when a plan or a certificate is needed once more.
What that looks like feature by feature is set out in what a client portal changes for an architecture practice, and the version for practices working with contractors and subcontractors is on the page for architects and contractors.
Comfortable architecture is the approach of Saraiva + Associados to designing the client’s experience of a project with the same attention as the building. The client is guided, informed and told what comes next, so the process feels as considered as the result.
A building project runs for months or years. The client experiences the process the whole time and the result only at the end, so what a client remembers, and what they tell other people, is formed long before handover.
