A render made in week four is a promise about materials, light, weather and furniture that nobody in the room is in a position to keep. Clients remember it. Six months later, when the building is better and the light is different, the render is what they compare it to.
There is a worse version of the problem. If the image is made early enough, the building starts being designed to produce the image. Rooms get shaped by camera angles. This happens quietly and it is very hard to reverse.
What we do instead, for the first four months, is models and hand sections. They are ambiguous in the right way: they show massing, light and structure without pretending to know what the kitchen worktop is made of.
When the render does arrive, it is fast, because everything in it has already been decided. The last three projects took two days each rather than the two weeks a speculative image takes, because there was nothing left to invent.
Two clients have asked us to break this. We did it once, in 2023, and the project took an extra eleven weeks. We have not done it since.
