Inside NYC Kitchens with Zak Van Buren: Smart Remodeling for Real Life

Transcription

Bella Bennett: Hello everyone. Welcome to the NYC Design Build podcast. I’m Bella, and I’m super excited for today’s conversation. As someone who is always curious about how great design meets real-life function, especially in a city like New York, this topic is close to my heart. Today I’m joined by Zak from NYC Design Build.

He has tons of hands-on experience transforming New York kitchens into spaces that are not only beautiful, but also super functional and thoughtfully designed. And today we’ll be talking about kitchen remodeling together. Hello, Zak. Welcome. How are you?

Zak Van Buren: I’m great, Bella. Thanks for having me on.

Bella Bennett: Thank you so much.

Let’s get into it. I’d like to start by going a bit deeper than just style. What are some signs that a kitchen truly needs a remodel beyond just looks?

Zak Van Buren: Well, beyond the superficial. So, in other words, if you come into a kitchen, whether it’s a new homeowner or someone who’s just reached the threshold of their tolerance for the existing aesthetic presentation of a kitchen. If we’re talking about beyond looks, I can start with the obvious. Obviously, mechanical functionality. So, in other words, appliances are maybe getting a little long in the tooth, or if they’ve outlived their functionality, that’s a point at which, of course, one’s going to start considering making significant upgrades.

And then, as the snowball rolls down the hill, as is often the case, it leads into other changes. If we’re staying again, not just aesthetically and just staying within the confines, again, of mechanics, there could be a change in one’s lifestyle that changes the need for, again, the functional mechanical layout of a kitchen space.
So, a family may grow, where there’s a new family member, you could be taking in an auntie or an uncle that’s moving in downstairs, all of a sudden, they’re cooking differently, or you need to make more food. You could be welcoming a child to the family and needing to expand the capacity.
So, all of a sudden you notice, “Ah, maybe we need a larger dishwasher or a larger sink for soaking and washing our dishes, or more prep space, or larger refrigeration,” and all. As we all know, most kitchens are designed to relatively, if not seamlessly, usually within relatively tight thresholds.
So, if you are expanding or changing the dimensions of one appliance, then the knock-on effect is going to affect countertops and cabinetry. And before you know it, you’re looking at a possible renovation. Sometimes, also, it can be a new tenant or a new owner, and it might not be an aesthetic issue, but it could also be a cultural one.
There are, of course, different cultures that have different approaches to how they host and how they live in their kitchens. Anything from cultures which require separate storage for separate types of cutlery and food prep for spiritual reasons, to just the fact that it could be a new homeowner who, let’s say, the previous owners were more traditional, and maybe only one or two of the individuals or a spousal couple were preparing meals in the kitchen, to a situation where it’s common for someone and three of their brothers to be cooking in there, a mother and a mother-in-law and her auntie and sister in there, or so all of a sudden you need more air, you need to expand the footprint. It can also be the same number of people, same homeowners, same family, but maybe part of the family has aged up. So, you might’ve had two kids earlier who used to have to be in maybe high chairs at a table, and all of a sudden now they’re at an age where…

Hey, if we could just put them in a couple of bar stools at the countertop, we could get our breakfast out fast, quick, efficient, and also spend quality time together with maybe the mother or father or auntie or whoever’s, or grandma, whoever’s doing the breakfast with the kids right there.

And also, that space can serve as homework prep and that, or like last-second homework assistance before getting them onto the school bus. As people in the family, as they age, they can have different needs. And it can also work for the adults, maybe at one point in time were having the kids at the dinner table more frequently.

They could have been teenagers. Now the kids have gone off to college, and now it’s more, mom and dad are now chilling, empty nesters. Then lastly, of course, further non-aesthetic reasons for upgrades or when you know it’s time to have that kind of renovation or renovate your kitchen. Of course, it goes without saying, any kind of degraded branch lines or problems that are happening with water pressure or, god forbid, a gas connection issue.

Or if you smell gas, of course, step one: utilities, and step two, you might want to also make an alteration. Again, back to appliances, you might want to be switching from gas to electric or vice versa. So, I’ve had chefs move into places that had electric convection action cooktops and they wanted to go to gas.

So, of course, once you start trenching the walls to run gas lines, now you’re probably leaning into having a renovation of some sort because you’re going to be damaging a lot of the cabinets to run those gas lines. Let’s see. And then other things could be that have nothing to do with aesthetics could be changing the layout of your home as well.

It could be a situation where you might think the kitchen looks great, but you might need it in an actual different location, slightly. And that’s, of course, you’re going to be totally demolishing your existing kitchen. And then other things, reasons why you might know, even if it’s not an aesthetic issue, that it might be time to renovate your kitchen.

You could be bringing your home to market. You might think you’ve got a beautiful kitchen. You love it. It serves you quite well, but maybe it’s a bit outdated. I know in New York City, most newly acquired homes that have kitchens that are more than even, sometimes only 5, 6, or 7 years old, buyers may be looking for newer kitchens.

Sometimes you have to weigh the pros and cons of renovating it in advance. Will you get that money back on the sale, or leaving it as is and just having to deal with that during the negotiation process, perhaps with the buyer?

That’s something that I’m brought into that conversation constantly. We have a huge network of real estate professionals I’ve been working with for over 15 years, among many other contacts in New York City, that just ring me all the time or text me and send me pictures and say, “Hey Zak, my client’s bringing this house to market, or this apartment to market. What do you think it’s going to cost for it to look okay on Zillow and StreetEasy and all those sites?”

And I can tell them whether I think it’s worth putting lipstick on a pig and just putting in some superficial, newer stuff or living with it as is, and then just understanding that there may need to be some wiggle room during the closing, on the sale part of the price.

Yeah. So I would say those are reasons why someone might be considering renovating their kitchen for reasons that have nothing to do with aesthetics. Sure.

Bella Bennett: Amazing. That was an amazing start. So, my second question is, when you work with homeowners who have a strong style preference, maybe they want something ultramodern or really classic, how do you help them make sure it still works well for everyday use?

Zak Van Buren: That’s a good question. I don’t know, 10, 15 years ago we started, it was in parallel with certain technologies and new equipment that was coming on board. But there was a real push, at one point in time, and I think it’s still going on. I find it fairly attractive as well, having kitchens that sort of disappear.

If you’re talking, you’re talking about sometimes, people wanna take a more modern or unconventional approach to how their kitchens might look, and the question of functionality with that. So, for example, in the mid to early aughts, in the 2010s and stuff, I… Because of very low profile cooktop options and even integrated cooktops and convection that can go right into countertops, in some cases, literally invisible, with heat coming up through what appears, optically, to be just part of the countertop.

If you do that in conjunction with some of the lower, what used to be really commercial refrigeration options, which are below-countertop refrigeration options, if you get those two things going, you could have a situation where, you know, to the eye, particularly in a loft space or a very open space, you could look out and not even see a kitchen.

So, in other words, you’d see a countertop area, and that is your cooktop area. And underneath that is refrigeration, and storage can also be seamlessly, very low profile, low seam, CNC millwork. So it just really looks like a very unified space, and you don’t even think about a kitchen being there.

I’m just using that as an example. Once you do that, it’s feasible to create an incredibly modern, slick look or contemporary, if you want, whatever, however you want to look at it. Aesthetic from a functionality standpoint, you can balance those things with those kinds of equipment and the integrations and everything.
But you have to consider several things. One is, of course, cost, right? So, millwork of that type is gonna just be prohibitively expensive for a lot of buyers, particularly those who are gonna be looking at a positive return on investment within the next couple of years. They might not see a proper return on that, or at least whatever, depending on their goals.
And then another can be back to functionality. Having a multitude of commercial refrigeration units beneath a countertop might not appeal to a lot of people who love the idea of just being able to open your doors and seeing everything right there, easy to grab.
So there’s a bit of bending down and stuff. It doesn’t work very well in terms of aging in place. So, if you’re in your… I’m already approaching an age where bending down to reach for things in the refrigerator, while very much doable, is not always preferable. I would love to have things more chest, waist, eye height. So, bending, having to go underneath a cabinet can be a little bit clunky. And then the same thing with the exotic accessorization and hardware you’re going to need to use for some of the pullouts and stuff in your cabinetry if you’re really gonna make it seamless.

So really, there are cost factors to all those kinds of things. I like to lean into, of course, marrying the two. By the nature of my work and the diversity of work that I’ve had and it being New York City, there’s no such thing as a typical client or a typical project.

So you’ve gotta be very attuned. And my job is to really come up with a, really identify and then solidify their hierarchy of needs and make sure that they’re gonna end up with a kitchen that doesn’t just look phenomenal out the box, but also after six months, six years down the line, they’ll also feel really good about the decisions that they made spatially.

So balancing those concerns is huge. So your question was about how to integrate, I think, form and function, if I understand correctly. And the first thing I’m gonna do is ask people about how they use their kitchen. I know it’s an unbelievably simple question, but a lot of people don’t think about it too much.

And then once they start thinking about it, they don’t necessarily think about it through the lens of someone who’s done over 500 kitchens. There’s this whole idea about triangulation of refrigeration, storage, sink or dishwasher, and the cooktop just to create kind of an ease of motion because of layout.

That doesn’t always work. We have a huge, one thing that I think is so fun about doing my work in New York City is that between Landmark Preservation Commission, architectural details that may be of a historic or architectural nature, or a preference that wants to be kept intact and remain, or the fact that a huge percentage of my clients have historically been in doorman buildings, elevator buildings, apartment buildings where there are relatively fixed service points.

Those are all kinds of limitations that create a net, to the tennis court, right? They say tennis is only interesting because there’s a net, right? So you have these parameters that you can function within, right? So those are, in one sense, a little bit limiting. In another sense, it means you’re almost never gonna get bored.

And in another sense, it’s nice because it can always help to channel the conversation, right? If someone is, if I’m doing a project outside the city or in the suburbs, or in many cases, townhouses and that kind of thing in the city, if really the world is your oyster and you can put things anywhere you want, the good news is awesome. You can make this exactly what you want, the bad news, and it actually is bad news for both sides. And when I say bad, it’s not that bad. But, the downside, if you will, is that it can be very hard to corral that conversation because you have so many options that, “Oh, should the kitchen be there? It could be there, it could be there, it could be there.”

Where does it work best? And then you have to come up with all those other considerations. Again, we do it all the time, but it’s a more open, framed conversation if we’re talking about traditional parameters of kitchens and balancing form and function. First of all, I will start with this.

Unless I have a client who’s a dadaist or an absurdist, and I have had them, sometimes not always, they follow the category of clients who are visual artists, maybe work in film or music or something like that, and they actually want. They want the form at the forefront and functionality to follow.
I would say that is the less common priority. It’s usually focus on function first, and then we can reverse engineer to make this as beautiful as humanly possible. From there, the last thing I want is a kitchen that doesn’t work well, right? So, it’s got to work well. And the overwhelming majority of my clients need a very functional kitchen.
To that end, as I alluded to earlier, you want to reduce the amount of steps, stride space, distances between the most critical points of prep, heating, setting aside, storage, refrigeration. So, it’s always better to have those kinds of functional operations happening within as close proximity as possible with storage.
Beyond that, and of course, I always work in towards that hub. With regards to storage, what I mean by that is larger cleaning, pantry-type of storage, usually more in the outskirts because you’re rarely using that in conjunction at the same time that you’re cooking. You’re very, unless you’re a robot on the Jetsons, it’s very rare for you to be making French toast and vacuuming simultaneously or swiffing simultaneously.
So, those can be a little bit further out. And then, of course, you want your essentials closer, closer. This is not rocket science. We all know this. You’re always going to see your olive oils, your salt and peppers, and your spice racks in closer proximity. But that needs to be planned for and accounted for, and often it’s not.

For example, I’ll often see, in kitchens I’m removing, more often than the ones I’ve built, you’ll often see pull-out spice racks and things like that further towards the edge of the storage, and at least in the house that I grew up in, and the house that my folks still live in now. It’s funny.

My parents are awesome. They designed their kitchen before I was doing this kind of work. Their renovation was the kitchen that my parents used is now 24 years old. So, before I started doing this work in New York City specifically, but they just have big pull-out drawers directly beneath their cooktop, which has all their spices in it.

It’s incredibly effective, I’ll say that. And it’s efficient. Is it the most glorious design? That’s for another conversation. But, it’s effective. So yeah, the things that you’re gonna be using every day, you know, you want them, yes, within arm’s reach. And that’s really where the conversation starts.

Then you start talking about things like, I don’t think I’ve ever designed a kitchen without asking questions. How often do you guys… ‘Cause people often will think about that Thanksgiving dinner, or in some cases, it could be your Shabbat dinner, or it could be any kind of, people’s minds go there because emotionally people have such an emotional connection to food and hospitality and hosting.

And the kitchen is, of course, like a physical manifestation of that. So, it’s not uncommon for their minds to go to those kinds of big holiday needs. Okay. And part of my job in early conversations about coming up with kitchen plans, and again, I’m usually managing the design team at this point, is, let’s walk that back a little bit.

We will get to that. Okay. We want to make sure that hosting at your maximum capacity is a possibility. And in fact, we want to get to a point, depending on how frequently you do it, where we can figure out whether that’s what your kitchen should be designed for, or if that’s something your kitchen should be able to do.

So if you’re, a lot of people, they host like a big… they’re becoming fewer and less common, sadly, but a huge family dinner on a Friday night, or it could be on a Saturday or it could be a Sunday roast if you’re from some parts of the world. If you’re hosting one every single week, we really need to build for that.

But if we’re really being honest and we really, really lay bare the truth and the reality of our hosting schedules throughout the course of the year, if it ends up being only a three or a four-time-a-year thing, in reality, we want to plan for that. Maybe it’s a situation where we can design things so that your main dining table has leaves in it that can expand, but so that everyone can sit comfortably.

But maybe not in a way that’s going to be every single week and that kind of thing. And then, of course, getting into things like, I know it sounds like a rather personal question, but, hey, what do you usually have for breakfast? Do you have breakfast? Do you make your breakfast at home?

If you don’t, that can change the conversation. With regards to what kinds of appliances you need to find a home for on the counter, if you’re the… because I like everything to have a home and be away if possible. But if you’re someone who makes toast every single morning and you make it just the way grandma did, an old-school toaster deal, okay, cool.

We need to accommodate that, and that’s a reality. I lived in a space and had a client who needed integrated, built-in woks. That’s something that needs to be customized and accounted for. And one needs to be sensitive to those kinds of needs. And the other thing also, in terms of really getting into the weeds and these kinds of functional things, is also, kinds of foods.

Which again, sounds perhaps personal or why does it matter? Not all types of cooking are created equal. If someone’s doing a lot of, if someone’s big on baking, that’s going to require different kinds of equipment and also, ducting perhaps, than someone who, back to the wok idea.

That’s why it was in the front of my mind. If you’re a kind of family that comes from a part of the world where it’s very important in your family tradition to make a lot of, like fried fish and things like that, we need to be pretty heavy on the, whether it’s carbon capture and duct systems.

We need to get a very robust hood. We might need to start thinking about very serious, yeah, like hood and duct systems that are gonna really do the job of taking those odors and sometimes smoke out of the house.

Bella Bennett: Good.

And my next question will be about budgeting. Budgeting can be stressful for homeowners. What is the most common budgeting mistake homeowners make when planning their kitchen remodel?

Zak Van Buren: Let’s see, common mistakes. So I try to get ahead of these things as early as possible because there’s nothing more important, I think, from my standpoint than establishing proper budgets first. If you don’t, I can’t tell you how, I… it’s literally on a weekly basis, I’m involved with some kind of project, whether from a consultative standpoint, it’s usually in that kind of capacity.

Or being brought in to look at a situation where something was either overlooked or improperly valued on the front end of the budget-establishing phase. And so I guess I’ll get into two common missteps. I’ll start by saying, very understandably, look, if I didn’t work in this world, if I hadn’t done as many projects as I had, I don’t know where I would start in terms of reverse engineering, getting ahead of these kinds of evaluations and budgeting mistakes because…

It’s hard to Google. So many places are so unique and so many issues can be unique to different types of kitchens, building types, environments, and code compliance and stuff. So there are a thousand things that can go awry in the budgeting phase, but I’ll start by getting the bigger, most common ones.

So first and foremost, you really need to think about… My first questions when it comes to budgeting are, what is your long-term plan with this space? What I mean by that is, again, this is because I work in New York City and the surrounding areas. So like every place, I’m sure on earth, your home is also an incredible and very valuable asset as well.

How people view their home and how they’re relating to it as an asset will largely impact what I might recommend for budgets with the kitchen. What I mean by that is if someone is buying a penthouse in the city because they’ve taken a big job, let’s say in some downtown financial institution and they know they’re gonna be there for five years, but they’re not sure about after that, okay, that’s really gonna impact what I would allocate for a kitchen because, unlike the bathroom, the ROI on the kitchen, you have many elements in the kitchen which are going to depreciate at a rate that is faster than the finished materials you’re gonna put into bathrooms.

So, let me walk that back a little bit. In bathrooms, think about the finished materials—tile, that’s a non-mechanical material, right? It’s static. As long as it’s cared for, it can look beautiful for a very, very, very long time. And properly grouted, something like a bathtub, a sink, plumbing fixtures.
There are very few components that have electrical or gas, technologically integrated digital functionality, right? So there’s a very high probability that if you design a beautiful bathroom with timeless fixtures and materials, it can hold its value for a very, very, very long time.

With kitchens, cabinets are largely made of wood or composites or sometimes other exotic materials. Most of those materials are coming in proximity with expansion, contraction of humidity and moisture, steam, heat. They’re in close proximity to cooktops. Their doors are being opened and closed, opened and closed, many of them much more frequently than, say, vanity doors in your bathrooms.
So they’re getting a lot of abuse, a lot of wear and tear. Often, not always, but often, particularly if you have a family. The mechanicals are being used heavily. These are things that have motors. These are things that have parts that break down. These are things that have digital interfaces. These are things that have technologies that may be outdated in a period of time.
There was that whole thing, I don’t know, seven or eight years ago, where Samsung refrigerators were getting hacked into, and all of a sudden, people’s data was being exposed because of a kitchen appliance. So, the rate of technological evolution in kitchen mechanicals and kitchen equipment is moving at a speed that’s faster than other parts of the house.
So the depreciation is real in kitchens. That is very, very important. To come back to my original question and curiosity, when I ask people, “What is your long-term plan with this home?” What I’m really asking is, “Is this a place you’re looking to sell on in five years?” Not necessarily flipping.

Flipping’s a whole other story. Someone says they’re flipping the house, I know what to do. We’re not putting in top-end anything. Probably if it’s a place they’re gonna be for five years, I want to get you, from a budgetary standpoint, I wanna make sure that it’s very reasonable, but keep you within the parameters of extremely functional, but with an eye to the future that they’re gonna have good curb appeal in five years.

If you tell me you’re gonna take me out of this place toe first, right? We’re, these kids are gonna go to… we’ll be, I’m not moving out of here until it’s into the ground. Cool. Then I know it’s then just let’s get everything exactly what you want. The budget should be with the idea that you’re gonna be getting value out of this for the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years.

Okay, so those numbers are gonna look very, very different once we’ve identified that. So, in terms of mistakes, once the homeowner has a real firm idea of what the long-term plan is for the home, that’s when the real budgeting starts. ‘Cause then I have an idea of is this gonna be a timeless part of the home that this person is gonna have derived value from for multiple decades in the future?

Or is this a place that’s probably an in-between kind of space that’s gonna really affect budget once we have that sorted out? Mistakes that often happen, or that I have seen happen… I like to think I’ve gotten ahead of most of this stuff at this point in my career. I always tell people there’s… this is the shortest way I’ve found to be able to explain this in my many years of doing this after well over 500 kitchens, which means I’ve probably done well over a thousand onsite estimates, is I tell homeowners, think about your money going into three buckets.

Okay? Bucket one is the majority of the resources of your money, and that’s gonna be in your labor and raw materials. Bucket two is your finished materials. Bucket three are soft costs. Let me break those down just a little bit.

Your labor and raw materials: The good news is that you should know with a good builder and a good contractor and someone who’s experienced should be able to get you, regardless of the building type, when it comes to kitchens, within a 10 or 12% at worst threshold of where that’s going to land as an allocation.

So, in other words, if I go into a kitchen in Manhattan and I look at the square footage and I look at where it’s going, I know your labor and raw materials, let’s hypothetically say, is gonna be 70K, let’s just say hypothetically, just for your labor and raw materials. That’s very much knowable at the front end.

Okay, someone who’s experienced in doing kitchens is then gonna look at what, show me your aspirational kitchen, what you like. I can look at what you like and then reverse engineer that and know, okay, given what you like, the kitchen that you are going to be happy with. The second bucket of finished materials: it’s probably gonna be this much, it’s gonna cost you this much.

So, for example, what’s very important to realize is that second bucket of finished materials, people ask… one problem mistake that happens is that a lot, often not all of the finished materials are accounted for in that bucket. I know this sounds a little bit boring, but one, and that needs to be completely threshed out.

Everything from light switches to, and I’ll give you examples in a second. What you need to come up with is a complete inventory, a complete master finished material list, a finished material schedule of everything that you’re going to need. And we need to come up with thresholds for every single one of those line items.
And because those haven’t been selected yet, at the time that you go into agreement with your contractor, you’ve got to get that tight. Because until you have those three buckets added up and that number is workable, you have a project that is destined for disaster. So, bucket one, labor, raw materials.
I have done so many kitchens in New York City. You could talk to me on the phone, I can look at pictures on Zillow, StreetEasy, or you could send me pictures through the phone. I can tell you what your labor and raw materials is gonna be for your kitchen project. Probably. Okay. After a 10-minute conversation, I can probably be 95 to 97% confident in my number. And when I say 95 to 97% confident, I mean that I will be within 10 or 12% of the threshold, 95 to 97% of the time just from that quick conversation.
‘Cause kitchens, when you’ve done 500 of them, you’ve been to the rodeo, you know how much they’re gonna cost. When it comes to finished materials, that’s probably where very big mistakes can happen because, first of all, a contractor is usually making more of their money on the labor and raw materials.
So, let me give you a perfect example. A shady, less honorable, or just maybe well-intended but less experienced kitchen installer. Let’s say you tell your contractor, you find a good contractor, or they come word of mouth, or you like them or you know them or whatever, however you find them.
And you tell them, “Hey, my budget is… I’ve got $75,000 to do my kitchen in Manhattan.” Okay? It’s doable. You can do a kitchen for 75K, no problem, depending on certain circumstances, but let’s say it’s a huge kitchen and all this kind of stuff. Let’s say the contractor knows that your labor and raw materials are gonna be $60,000.

Okay? That leaves you with 15K for your finished materials and your soft costs, and I’ll get to soft costs in a little bit. That’s a less important thing for kitchens, but that is a completely horrible, destined-for-total-destruction, lawsuits, nasty phone calls and emails situation. There’s not enough money for your finished materials.

It’s the wrong ratio, okay? Too much of your money is going to your labor and raw materials, which means it’s gonna be going into the pocket of your contractor. Not enough is gonna go to your finished materials. Too much is going to labor and raw. So, in other words, you’re gonna have this great labor with probably underwhelming materials.

It’s the wrong ratio. So, the proportions need to be, not balanced equally, but need to be correct. So, kitchens are an interesting outlier because kitchens, because of the cost of countertops, how incredibly crazy expensive they can be, and cabinets and appliances, kitchens are the one place where if it’s only a kitchen renovation, the finished materials costs could exceed your labor and raw materials.

It’s possible. Bathrooms, almost never. Whole home renovations, certainly. I shouldn’t say certainly… yeah, certainly never will the finished material costs exceed your labor and raw material costs. Kitchens, that can sometimes be different. But either way, everything needs to be accounted for.

And then soft costs are just your costs like in New York City or any municipality, your filing fees, there’s gonna be probably some inspections. Even if it’s not a particularly inspected location, which good luck finding that in the Northeast, but even if there are no real inspections or anything, you’re still talking about insurance overhead.

Again, certain design fees and that kind of stuff. If you’re doing a full home renovation, those soft costs are like your architectural fees, your department of buildings fees and all that kind of stuff. That’s always gonna be the smallest bucket in your, of the three that you need to think about.

You need to make sure that when you add up all three of those buckets—your labor and raw materials (that’s your contractor), your finished materials (which is, I might as well address that now), people have often asked me, “Zak, what is a finished material?” The easiest way to remember it, or the easiest way I’ve been able to come up with to communicate it, is if you are going to select that material, it’s a finished material if you would want to have a say in the purchasing of that material.

It’s a finished material, so that means everything from switch plate covers and outlet covers to your countertop, your cabinets, of course, but then even something like a toe kick or the accessories in your cabinets and stuff like that.

If you’re gonna be selecting them, it’s a finished material. That means everything else is a raw material. So if it’s your drywall, the wood for framing, the actual raw plumbing lines and your branch lines and copper pipes and any PVC and all that kind of stuff, that’s all raw materials. The wires for your electrics, those are raw building materials.

But anything, even the paint, a finished material if you would select it, it’s a finished material. Another way to look at it, which I’ve told people, is if you can see it, it’s almost definitely a finished material. If when you walk in, when the project is done and you walk into the kitchen and you’re hosting people, everything they can see, that’s a finished material.

Another thing that is not a finished material that I try to tell people are things that fall into FFE, furniture, fixtures, and equipment. So, in other words, if you or I, Bella, can pick it up and walk out the door with it, that’s also not a finished material in the sense that it’s not part of your design, build, or kitchen renovation process.

So, a refrigerator is a finished material, but your skillet is not a finished material. Your vase, not a finished material. That’s part of your decor. So, in terms of mistakes that are made, other things you wanna do… The opportunity for mistakes to be made in the labor and raw material part is you wanna make sure that your builder is doing some probes and just has already shown, or at least already has identified, where the plumbing risers are, where the waste risers might be, and where the electrical risers might be.

So that there are not any crazy surprises. You don’t want them to say, “Oh, I priced out your kitchen for your sink to go over there. But now that I’m looking at it, it can’t go over there unless we do X, Y, and Z, and that’s gonna cost an extra $5,000.” Okay?
Those kinds of things can emerge in the design process. But if you have a very thorough, very experienced person on the front end, your opportunity to avoid anything like that is maximized.

Okay. So, in terms of mistakes that are made on the front end from homeowners… First of all, engaging with a builder who’s either less, who’s perhaps not as experienced, or if their scope of work doesn’t look precise enough. Those are… You wanna make sure that the scope of work that is discussed is really threshed out in the document that you’re moving forward with in your agreement. Obviously, you wanna review that.

But then, with regards to budgeting, you’ve gotta make sure that the total number of your soft costs, finished materials, and labor and raw materials can be supported by what you have allocated to the project.

And then, as a rule of thumb, if it’s an apartment building, 5, 7, 8, 10% as a contingency plan, a just-in-case. Who knows? If it’s a townhouse, start at 10% from a contingency standpoint. Particularly in New York City, we have brownstones and freestanding townhouses and homes that are from the 18th and early to mid-19th century, or the first third of the 20th century.
Those buildings can have things behind the walls that are just unprovable during the onboarding process or during the scope generation process.

So, yeah, you want to allocate north of 10, 12% as a contingency for those kinds of buildings. And also, understand you might also wanna keep some money aside if you’re the kind of people who will gravitate towards expanding the scope of work, just because, during the design process, something changes, and you want to be able to be open to being more flexible or taking advantage of some of those opportunities.
You might want to keep an extra 5% aside for something like that from a budgetary standpoint.

But the main thing above everything—I should have mentioned this at the very forefront—the first thing to do is to find a builder that you feel very, very comfortable with, trust, and have a good rapport with.
‘Cause this is a dialogue that’s gonna go on for a while. You wanna make sure that you feel comfortable communicating with them and that you trust them. That they, of course, pass your sniff test, but also that the communication is fluid and easy. Why I say that is because often, communicating about things we’re insecure about can be difficult.

So, you want to make sure that there’s a good conversational rapport and that there’s trust. And the biggest outcome of trust is, of course, going to be honesty and transparency. And the biggest benefit of being honest and transparent, particularly during the early stages, is you’ve got to be transparent about your budget and about your goals.

I like to ask people the following question—I’ll often ask prospective clients and homeowners: What’s the number that you’d be really excited to hit? What’s your target budget? What’s the one that, if we hit it, you’d throw all the builders a nice party at the end of the project, you’d be excited about?
What’s a number that is absolutely radioactive? What is the radioactive number? What is the Chernobyl number? I need to know the Chernobyl number. From the Chernobyl number, I’ll take an order of magnitude down from that and plan the entire project to 15 to 20% below that Chernobyl number, ’cause we don’t wanna go anywhere near that.
We don’t want anything to be… And that’s, again, back to mistakes that are made. If you meet a builder and you tell them, “Hey, I’ve got a budget of $75,000 or $100,000 for my kitchen,” great. And they lay out, even if they lay out for you a plan of where the labor raw materials would be X, the finished materials would be Y, soft cost will be Q, and it adds up to $100,000 or even $95,000.

Problems. You’ve got, you need wiggle room in all those areas, right? You need to do costing exercises and pricing exercises that are going to make sure that the project is safe. And again, why more builders aren’t more attuned and paying more attention to this on the front end… I don’t know, because to me, it’s as bad for the builder as it is for the homeowner.
Unless your goal is to do five or six kitchens in New York City and then move to, I don’t know, the woods of Vermont or Chile or something to escape the law, I don’t see the upside for the builder either.
‘Cause the last place you want to be in this world is halfway through a project, or three-quarters through a project, and uh-oh, now the homeowner realizes they can’t afford the finished materials they want, or they’re gonna have to get super creative with their finances to make certain things work that they thought were gonna be a lot easier to make work.
You just don’t want to be in that kind of situation. I’m certainly at a point in my career where I learned like everyone else, the hard way, that both parties need to know when to say no or when it’s not a good fit, and that goes to… So, for example, another mistake about budgeting…

So, I know what my fees and costs are. So, let’s imagine a world where someone asked me to do an onsite for their kitchen. And let’s say I say, “Your labor and raw materials are gonna be $75,000. I think your projected costs, based on what kind of kitchen you guys like, plus the part of town and the property value and what recently renovated places near you have spent, this is where your finished materials are probably gonna be. And here’s where your soft costs are probably gonna be.”

And let’s say somebody said—this happens to me all the time—they say, “Hey, Zak, you’re recommended by this architect or by this real estate professional, or I saw you through some other media. I really want to work with you. Let’s work together. Can you do better on your labor or something like that?”

I can change the scope of work to maybe make the numbers fit. But if your contractor, builder, or design-build firm comes back to you and says, “Okay, I originally presented $75,000 for your labor and raw materials for your kitchen renovation. But you know what? We all wanna work together. I’ll make it $50,000,” no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Um, I don’t want to be so dramatic and say run screaming in the opposite direction, but two huge red flags just went off for me. Number one, could they have done it for $50,000? In which case, they were being very predatory with their pricing, which means imagine what they’re gonna do when there’s a change order or something arises if they were already trying to gouge you for something like 50% north of where they needed to be on the price. Then look out, right? That’s an issue.

And then the other side is… the other reality is that they probably can’t do it for $50,000 and they’re just trying to get you on board. And I hate to paint such a disparaging and horrible picture of what some people will do, but you will find people behaving in this way in any industry. It’s not just design, build, or contracting. It’s in automotive and real estate and, honestly, in financial instruments of every kind, from insurance to anything you can name.

There are people who are trying to get you on board with the understanding that they’ll make money in some other way on the backend or in some other way.

And what that usually means is if they originally presented you with a cost of $75,000 and now they’ve dropped it to $50,000 to do the same kitchen for the same scope of work, obviously, it doesn’t make any sense. They’re gonna either try and ping you with change orders to try and get back up to that $75,000, or they are going to maybe be less than transparent with how they’re billing for their finished materials.
Which, oh, I’ll come back to that in a second. You’re going to end up paying one way or the other. Probably, if the original number was $75,000, again, unless they were being hyper-predatory, it just… it’s not a good place to start.

Finished materials. Let’s go to that for a second in terms of where mistakes can be made from a budgetary standpoint. In the same way that honesty and transparency and having really good understandings of a granular and thorough scope of work is incredibly important for the agreement, having that finished material schedule really threshed out is critical. And there’s another component to it.
For many years, I helped other people build design-build firms. I still do, I still consult with design-build firms. And I kind of, yeah, get brought in and show ’em best practices and what works and what doesn’t. Again, learning what does work was fun. Learning what doesn’t work was not fun. But all of it was gained from experience.
And I’m an open book, and I’ll share that with… that’s what I do. I share that with people, both homeowners and design-build firms when it comes to mistakes that are made from a budgetary standpoint with finished materials and with regards to the honesty and transparency component.

After I, again, helped many design-build firms formulate their practices, some of the design-build firms sought to, for a variety of reasons, and not all of them were necessarily negative or immoral by any stretch of the imagination, but many of them sought to maximize revenues with their finished material component.

Okay. So, I was exposed to how a lot of different design-build firms went about billing for their finished materials. And at the end of the day, I always will come back to transparency being king, for a multitude of reasons. The most obvious being, of course, moral and ethical reasons.

But once you move beyond even the moral and ethical benefits of full transparency, there’s also an efficiency and an efficacy benefit. And that is, I want homeowners to see exactly what’s being purchased, for exactly what price. If there are any upcharges or additional charges, whether it be for procurement, quality control, or other types of design services necessary, whether it be in templating or fabrication of certain materials, I want that all to be extremely clear so I can show the client a completely clear document so we’re all on the same page.
There’s no sleight of hand, no three-card monty happening here, no bait and switch, and no weird stuff where I just send… I know companies that’ll send basically the equivalent of a Microsoft Word document saying, “Hey, this is your finished materials cost. Send us a check. We buy, they show up.”

Right? That’s cool if a client has an unlimited budget and full trust. So, how many clients does that fit the bill? It’s only your rich auntie relationship. Is that gonna be the case? They trust, they were at your fifth birthday, and they’re fantastically wealthy. Congratulations, that’s a great client to have.
Other than that, I want to have full transparency. And again, that goes back to being able to properly budget. Okay?

Now, prices may be subject to change. In other words, the materials that you scope out or select at the beginning of the process… it’s inevitable, something will be out of stock at the moment that the builder needs it. And you might have to pick another, make a different selection, or the lead time for a certain appliance might end up not working with the production schedule, and you might have to make a different selection, okay?

But you need to have very accurate placeholders in place for all those finished materials so that you can, again, have that big delta number, that big number at the bottom.

That you can grapple with and understand, this is what our all-in costs are gonna be. And until you have a full understanding of the scope of work, a full understanding of all of the finished materials necessary, and placeholders in place for every single one of those materials in your finished material schedule, and an understanding of the probable costs of your soft costs…

So, in other words, is this building gonna require an engineer, a special inspector, a plumbing inspection, an electrical inspection? Are there gonna be post-application amendments? How many architectural hours are gonna be needed?

Until you have a clear view of all of that, it’s very hard to have an understanding of your total overall budget. So, once again, going with a reliable builder who’s done hundreds and hundreds of these is absolutely critical. I can’t express that enough. I am better at crystallizing and arriving at very accurate budgets today than I was 10 years ago.

And I was good 10 years ago. Now I am much better than that. But it took 300 more renovations. Go with people who are trusted. Ask a ton of questions. Make sure that they’re asking you a lot of questions in the budgetary planning stages. And that’s the best way to go.

If somebody comes, does an onsite, looks at your kitchen, says, “Oh, it’s nice,” and you tell them what you want and they say, “Okay, great,” and they don’t ask a lot of questions, and then they send you a proposal and you guys haven’t had a 30, 40, 50-minute, or even two-hour discussion about goals and budgets, and if you guys haven’t talked numbers prior to the proposal, and then you move forward with that proposal, I don’t know…

I don’t know where you are. I’ll jump in front of a bus to stop you from doing that. I don’t care who you are. It just, you have to manage it. You have to have clear expectations, and… I don’t know if it’s a future question that you had planned to ask, but I think it feeds into the budget as well.

What’s the oldest, what’s one of the most common New York City clichés that very few New Yorkers go a month without saying the sentence? Time is money, right? Time is, most of us say it, if not daily, we’re thinking it, right? So, time is money, right? Time is a huge part of your budget.

Yes, in New York City, the carry costs are astronomical. A huge percentage of my clients are either living in a property that they own that’s in the process of being sold on and they’re occupying until the renovation is done, or it’s on the market while they’re buying the new property, or they’ve closed on the new property, or they’re renting a place and then moving into the new property.

Either way, there are carrying costs, and so at the time of acquisition, whether it’s a townhouse, a brownstone, whatever it might be, or an apartment, whatever that is… it goes without saying, you’ve got all these carrying costs. Now, there could be maintenance costs that you’re paying. Man, if you think your maintenance fees in New York City hurt, man, do they hurt when you don’t even live there! When you’re paying three grand a month in maintenance fees for trash to be removed that you’re not even creating, for an in-building spa and weight room that you’re not using, for a parking space that you’re not using, for a doorman and concierge that you’re not using…
Oof. Does that sting every single month on top of your mortgage or however you’re doing your financing or whatever? And so, you want to get in there, right? Time is money, and you’re still carrying your previous property until the renovation is done.

The overwhelming majority of the time, kitchens are very destabilizing. I’ve had situations where an apartment, property, or home—particularly a large one—can, depending on the lifestyle of the homeowner, be renovated while the residents live in the house. Can a kitchen renovation be done while the residents stay in the house? Sometimes, but the older I get and the further I get into my career, I just know that certain headaches are worth avoiding.

While sometimes a kitchen can be renovated while the residents live in the house, it’s always going to come with additional stress and difficulty. It should be avoided at all costs. If it can’t be avoided, it can’t be avoided. And if it’s a type of property where the people can live somewhat comfortably in the home during the renovation, then okay, we can come up with a production plan where it’s feasible. But the majority of the time, it’s recommended to vacate the space.

Or don’t move in until the kitchen is renovated. If it’s a new acquisition, a new property, and back to the “time is money” component, a builder… back to the whole price thing, right? As weird and problematic as it will probably be if a builder who originally threw you $75K for labor and raw materials all of a sudden says $50K just to get you on board…

As problematic as that is, be equally scrutinizing and suspect if a builder who said your kitchen install will probably take, let’s say, 50 to 60 workdays, then you come back and say, “Oh, but I really want it done by the time the kids come back from camp.” And if they say, “Oh, no problem, okay, then we’ll get it done in 35 workdays,” like, no. How is that possible? Time is money and so is labor, right?

So, if I had given you a price, which assumed that I was going to have X number of workers on site for this period of time, and all of a sudden I’m doing it for less time, are my guys gonna work three times as hard or twice as hard for free and not charge me more for it? Or am I gonna put more guys on the job and those guys are volunteers? I don’t think so.

Right? So, if it’s a shorter timeframe, you’re gonna have to have more hands on deck working, when it comes to kitchens, or—definitely with bathrooms—but just sticking with kitchens, how many guys can you really throw at the job and increase the efficacy and efficiency in a positive way?

Also, you have the constraints of, again, most of the projects are done in elevator buildings in New York City, or there are building hour constraints. Or, even if it’s a brownstone, you’ve got neighbors on either side of you who are not gonna be enthusiastic about hearing noise next door going into, like, midnight, right? They’re not gonna be happy about cabinetry installations going on at 11:45 at night.

So, you’re still talking about normal work hour thresholds. So, if a builder comes down really aggressively on their timeline, right? While that may be attractive because it’s going to compress and reduce the amount of time you’re carrying both properties or gonna be outside of the space that you ultimately want to utilize, question that seriously. Ask them, “How are you going to accomplish that?”

You said it would take about 55 or so business days, and now you’re saying you can do it in 35. Walk me through how that’s gonna work. Most New York City buildings, you’re gonna have limited access to the freight elevator for deliveries and that kind of stuff. That’s not gonna magically change. I can’t go to the building engineers and the superintendent of the building and say, “Hey, my client wants me to finish in 30 days instead of 45. Do you think I can use the freight elevator twice as much?”
He’s gonna be like, “Are you out of your mind? You’re gonna get me fired.”

So again, if someone gets aggressive about time, that’s a red flag. So, what I would say is, have very realistic conversations about timelines with your build team so that you can factor that into your budget. And as part of your budget, it goes without saying, I think any adult will do this, but…
You’ve got to factor in your carrying costs right into your budget. What is also the cost of paying for two rents and mortgages or two mortgages at the same time for X amount?

And so, in terms of “quote-unquote” mistakes or mishaps or oversights during the budgetary phase, I would say those would be the majority of the most common ones.

Bella Bennett: Perfect. And let’s talk about layouts a little bit, for example. Yeah, kitchens in New York City can be interesting and, like, different. So how do you go about customizing layouts for really unique or tricky spaces here?

Zak Van Buren: There’s different kinds of tricky, right? I alluded to this earlier.
One kind of tricky is when I… either it’s a loft or perhaps a brownstone or townhouse where you have a lot of flexibility. In which case, the trickiness lives in refining the conversation to find out the best position, scale, size, and location of the kitchen based on, first of all, cost elements.
In other words, certain risers need to be relocated to put a kitchen in a certain location that needs to be considered because whether or not that falls within the budget or not. And then, yeah, again, functionality and aesthetic. All of that plays a role in terms of that kind of trickiness.

The other kind of trickiness is, of course, the constraints of infrastructure. So, if you’re in an apartment, or certainly if you’re in a studio apartment or one-bedroom or something like that, you have less flexibility with the location of your kitchen, of course. Also, many buildings have building bylaws that have to do with not putting wet over dry.
So, expanding your kitchen into an area that is dry square footage in the unit beneath you is something that not all buildings will even allow. If they do allow it, they will often have stipulations in terms of how additional waterproofing is done and that kind of thing.

So yes, there’s different kinds of trickiness with regards to how to approach and find the best layout within those constraints. Again, it goes back to what I described earlier. I want to start with function—what is it that you use your kitchen for the majority of the time? Design it to that.
And what are some outlier functions or uses that we need to accommodate but not necessarily plan for on a daily basis? As I said earlier, whether it’s the occasional hosting or if you’re planning to age in place.

So, in other words, we want to plan a kitchen that’s good for you in your forties, but you’re in love with this apartment, and you’re going to be here into your seventies and eighties. We want to plan the kitchen in a way that’s also going to work for you down the line, and accommodations can be made down the line, whether that be in the future, where we’re going to plan for pull-down accessories to help you with things that might be hard to bring heavy things down from high places later on in life.

Or we’re going to create an accessory, we’re going to install hardware that’s going to allow for you to pull plates or pots and pans and heavy objects up from below. All those kinds of things need to be threshed out and considered in that phase. But, look, New York City is just full of very unique constraints.

I’ve done a lot of projects, let’s say in the East Village, Lower East Side, in buildings that used to be tenements that are now higher-end, two- and three-bedroom apartments. The old service lines were all there to service back when it was like SROs (single-room occupancy type of spaces) or very small apartments.
And so, you get into quirky situations where sometimes kitchens can’t be anywhere else except in the corner. And then you just have to look. The most important thing is to work with an experienced build team, experienced designers who have done dozens, scores, and if not hundreds of these who have seen all different approaches so that the homeowner can be presented with a litany of options in some cases.

And this has to do with, again, just personal preferences and balancing those personal preferences with long-term goals. If sometimes, let’s say, if a kitchen needs to be in a less ideal location, do you want to own it and lean into that? Maybe you can do something where it is a little bit more bifurcated and sectioned off from the space with maybe a pass-through?
Or would it benefit more from opening it up completely and having more of an anchoring dining table element that’s going to be a little bit more at the forefront of the design?

So all of those things can be weighed. Yeah, no, we’ve had to deal with a lot of quirky kitchens. I’ve done penthouses, small studios where people don’t usually need a very big kitchen. So, if you’re only coming into New York City for business for three days, twice a month, and you’re really just using it for convenience or comfort, you’re only using it like six days out of the month…

‘Cause you don’t feel like going to a hotel every time. We can create a nice little kitchen or kitchenette that’s gonna get the job done for heating up things quickly and making your breakfast and that kind of thing. But you’re certainly not going to host a banquet in there.

So, yeah, I think as long as you’re open and honest in the design process and you want the design team to present you with a multitude of ideas… I’d say the quirkier or more challenging the location of the kitchen, the more you want to look at a couple of additional options and explore some other unconventional possible layouts.
If it’s a standard kitchen in an apartment building that was built in the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s, 2000s, or whatever, most of those buildings, they’re not gonna be too flexible with where to put the kitchen. And the layout will, functionality will almost dictate the most likely landing place for where everything needs to go.

And then at that point, you can just have a lot of fun and express your own preferences really with the finished materials and the finishes, whether it’s in the cabinetry or countertop type and backsplash and that kind of stuff. Really lean into that kind of, that realm of the project.

Bella Bennett: Good. And my last question will be about permits. What do homeowners need to know about permits and building codes here in New York City when they are starting a kitchen remodel?

Zak Van Buren: Yep. So look, the advice that I would give, yeah, anyone, is it would be far too intimidating a task to get one’s head completely around all of the DOB code relevant to kitchens in New York City. Because it depends greatly on the kind of building.
So let me start by saying, when it comes to codes and permits, let me start by going into different types of building types and what one might find, because that’s gonna really guide what I would recommend having at least a superficial understanding of with regards to permits and code compliance and potential DOB filings with regards to kitchens.

So, if you’re in the townhouse and you’ve got a bit more flexibility, if it’s a standalone home, you’re not gonna have, like, building management or boards that you’re gonna have to… community boards or tenant groups that you’re gonna have to push your plans through.
It’s really just working with your architect and the DOB and in some cases the LPs, Landmark Preservation Commission. And so, the benefit of that is that it’s fairly cut and dry. Your architect and expediter should know exactly what you’re gonna require.

So, if it’s only a superficial upgrade and you’re really just swapping out the existing materials for new materials, if you’re touching gas lines, you’re gonna end up filing, and you’re gonna need an architect and an expeditor. If it’s electric and you’re really just swapping out existing materials for new ones and it’s electric, you might be able to get away with smaller, more low-level types of filings, like an ALT-2 or something like that.

But if—getting to the more important ones—if you’re in an elevator building or an apartment building, or if you are in a co-op, like in a brownstone that has multiple units and you’re one of them, you’re a shareholder, your board of your building is going to have their own agreement.

So you’re gonna want to have a look at that and look at what the existing rules are for making alterations. You want to always look at it this way—look at it like, what would you want the tenant above you to have to do to ensure that the renovation is safe? Because you’re the one, you’re the tenant below them.
So you’d want to, of course, make sure that waterproofing is proper and inspected and signed off on. You’d want to make sure that all of the electricals are code compliant, that there’s no risk of fire, which will of course affect you too, right? Should that unfortunate event happen, you’d want to make sure that all the branch lines and connections are properly inspected.

Because if there’s a leak, to the best of my knowledge, gravity still only works in one direction—towards the center of the earth. And if you’re between your upstairs neighbor and the center of the earth, that water is gonna find its way into your ceiling very quickly. So, you want to think about it that way?

So when it comes to asking your builder and your build team, what permits do you see as being necessary? If it’s a simple plumbing permit, that could require a plumbing diagram your plumber should be able to generate with your architect and your expediter can file it. That can cost a few thousand dollars.

That’s often gonna get folded into your plumbing costs. That should be presented as either a line item, or it’ll be folded in and they’ll mention it in their stipulations or in their disclosures. Same thing with electrical—you can ask them, “Do you think that this project will require an electrical inspection?”

If you’re gonna be upgrading your electrical panel, of course, it will require an inspection. If there has not been a renovation done on your kitchen in a very long time, if you’re new to the space, or if it’s an older building and you notice that none of the outlets are grounded, or GFI/GFCI outlets…

In other words, if they don’t have that, to put it in layman’s terms, if your kitchen hasn’t been renovated in a long time and you don’t have that little button in between the outlets, which is sometimes backlit with an LED, then it might not be a grounded outlet.

And so those will have to be upgraded, which will, which means that you’re gonna have to have an electrical permit pulled to do the work properly. So those are things you wanna find out about with regards to a kitchen renovation. The other bigger ticket items that could lead into an ALT one filing permit, and that just means you’re gonna have to have more robust involvement from your architect is if you’re changing locations of the kitchen.

Particularly if it’s the townhouse and you’re changing it between floors for sure. You might be moving a kitchen , from a garden level to a parlor level or something like that. You’re getting into alt one territory for sure, which means that your architect’s gonna need to be more involved and you can expect to pay a larger architectural and expediting fees for that.

When it comes to, the other big thing is if you’re in an apartment building, a lot of people want to open up their kitchen, right? It might be an old, Butler’s pantry style or old school cloistered away kitchen, like back in the day, particularly you see this on the upper West side and a lot of your classic sixes and like a lot of those, older pre-war apartments will have the, the kitchen sort of, .

Away from the primary living area because back in the day it was, people had a lot of, support in their homes. They had, home cooks or, people doing that. And those people were, I hate to say it, often not to be, seen or heard from the family that was, occupying the primary living space.

Those times have changed. Fewer and fewer people keep a, a chef on staff to pre prepare all of their meals, in their apartment. If you do, congratulations, if you don’t, most people want to open up those kitchens because they don’t want the person in the kitchen to feel as though they’re like imprisoned in some other part of the house.

So when you open that up, you’re probably opening up walls. Now you’re getting into, again, back to, if you’re in a, in an apartment building, I. They’re almost definitely gonna want an alt one filing and an inspection to make sure that when you’re opening those walls, that nothing structural is being, manipulated or degraded.

And of course, that you’re not going to have to move any risers that might be in that wall, right? Whether they be wastewater, electrical. Again, the best advice is, particularly if you’re in an apartment building, just imagine what you would want your upstairs neighbor to file or have inspected if they were getting a renovation.
That’s all you have to think about, because that’s almost definitely what your building’s gonna ask you to do. Insurance rates are insane. The cost of renovation is high. People’s homes are, in many cases, one of their most important assets. People want to protect their assets. It’s understandable.

So, things have gotten more and more thorough, I think. Some might say for better or worse, but I would say generally for the better. I can’t think of a type of inspection that has come down the pipeline over the last 15 years that I thought was particularly egregious.
In fact, when I started in my career, you could get away with doing all kinds of renovations with very simple plumbing permits and that kind of thing. That’s changed, and I think mostly for the better. Unfortunately, and for the same reason why we have so many fire hydrants in the city and why we’re so crazy about sprinkler systems is because of so many disasters and tragedies that have happened.

Same thing with our permitting now, because we had a cluster—what is it now, maybe 12 or 13 years ago—where we had some horrible disasters in the city because of gas lines that were manipulated and uninspected.
That’s now a complete no-go. So anytime a gas line is coming into the picture, it’s gonna be very heavily inspected. Same thing with trying to make sure that nothing collapses, right? So, anytime you’re removing a certain number of square feet of a wall or a percentage of that wall, you’re gonna need to… your building’s almost definitely gonna want that inspected and that to be filed so that an engineer can say, “Hey, this is not load-bearing and it’s not gonna destabilize the building at all.”

That’s the most critical thing. Yeah. But in terms of getting your head around it as a homeowner, I would say—I know this sounds unbelievably stupid and simple—you might want to chat with ChatGPT or just Google “NYC code compliance” or “NYC sign-offs” or “NYC inspections for kitchen renovation.”
Take a couple notes, have a conversation with your builder, and be like, “Hey, I’m reading about PAA, I’m reading about LAA permits, I’m reading about plumbing inspections, I’m reading about electrical inspections, I’m reading about engineering sign-offs and inspections. Do any of these play into my kitchen renovation?”

A good contractor should be able to walk you through why each one of those questions either applies or doesn’t apply to your specific renovation. It’s, if it’s a very simple new build, new apartment building, maybe in FiDi or wherever you’re at, and it’s a studio apartment or one bedroom and you literally just want a facelift on the existing non-gas kitchen, your building might view it as a superficial renovation or tier one.
They might only want you to, I don’t know, file like an ALT-2 permit or even less than that, maybe just a plumbing permit and away you go.

But any design-build firm or contractor should be able to answer those questions and also tell you what to expect from a cost standpoint. The filing fees just for, let’s say, if you just want to do your kitchen, but you’re in a landmarked building in Park Slope or Cobble Hill or Carroll Gardens or who knows where, right? And you just want to do your kitchen. But there might be a component where it’s also gonna play into the exterior.

You might want to change the window or have a French door that opens onto a deck there. On the parlor level, it’s extremely common. You are now completely diving headlong into LPC (Landmark Preservation Commission) filings. Your build team should let you know about that—what are going to be the time elements, potential delays, timetables, and also the cost for the expeditor, which is who actually goes down to the DOB and mud-wrestles with the examiners and the people there.

And your actual filing architect, or what’s called your AOR (Architect of Record), is probably going to be the one working with you for a kitchen renovation, who’s actually going to put the plans together. Now, what’s very important about working with a design-build firm is that where a design-build firm becomes incredibly advantageous in doing kitchens is that we tend to have in-house designers.

So, for example, NYC Design Build, we of course have our in-house designers who are also all trained architects who understand New York City code. Why is that beneficial, and why is that beneficial in the permitting process? The biggest reason, the most obvious reason, the whole 60% of the reason why the entire model exists for doing this business and approaching the building process this way, is that the homeowner can go down the road of designing in confidence with someone who’s going to then hand it to the AOR to file at the DOB and know that the overall plan—however quirky, as you asked about earlier, or however unconventional it may be—will be code compliant.

If you don’t work with a design-build firm and you just either design it with your contractor or something like that, or design it yourself and just hand it to the contractor and say, “Hey, this is an idea,” or you have a… it’s happened a million times. I’ve had clients who have a friend… I had a client who had an architectural team back in France. Cool, they’ve worked with them for projects in France before, and they came up with a plan for a renovation for this client’s space in New York City.

They had no idea of New York City code. Not a problem. They just had to pass it through an AOR, an architect of record here, who would then make line notes and line edit, and then make changes. Those plans then had to go back to the architects in France, who were basically design architects at this point in time, and make those adjustments.

The client, in the meantime, was paying for all of that—the hours for the architect in New York City to assess this, I don’t want to say error-riddled, but unfeasible design and make notes. And then the French architectural team had to make those adjustments. The client’s paying now for all of those hours.

With a design-build team or design-build firm, if you’ve got a good firm that you’re working with, designers who have an architectural background, they’re going to steer the design process in a way that’s going to be feasible from a code compliance standpoint. So that when it lands on the desk of the AOR, they can say, “Okay, this person knows what they’re doing. Everything is code compliant.”

Oh, they might have a minor note here or there, or a question here or there, but basically it ends up taking all of those hours off the table of an architect who’s going to bill you up to the gills. It just ends up being a vastly more cost-effective and efficient process from a time standpoint.

Again, back to time being money, the process. When it comes to kitchens, and again, I deal with this probably every week, if I’m being generous, it happens all the time. Where I did an onsite a few days ago on Carroll Street. The homeowners had gotten an architect first, okay, to come up with the floor plan.

This goes back to the other benefit of the design-build firm: architects. Many of them are my best friends. I have lunch with architects every week, multiple times. Love the craft, love the art, love the science of it. Most architects that I know did not go to school for architecture because they’re extremely excited about waking up at 7:45 in the morning and being at the job site at 7:45 in the morning, arguing with plumbers over the cost of linear foot installation of branch lines.

For some faucets, they did not wake up. They did not become architects because it excites them to think about the cost per square foot of drywall. Okay? That’s not their world. Not everyone can be good at everything, and people, if they’re good at something, they probably are specializing in that and have less attention to other things.
Okay? So if you go with an architect first and you did not have the thought to value engineer the project as you go, there’s a very high probability that you’ll end up with a plan that then needs to be bid out, right, for cost. And that’s when you’re finding out the real cost and then you have to reverse engineer your entire plan because it didn’t fit the budget.

With a design-build firm, not only are the plans that are going to be generated feasible and code-compliant, and therefore remove very costly hours from an architect, particularly when it comes to a kitchen, but, ’cause with a kitchen, you probably just need, again, an architect of record at the DOB.
You don’t necessarily need an architect to design every facet of a kitchen. An interior designer with an architectural background will almost always suffice, and that’s what they specialize in. A design-build firm will have a designer who’s designing and also works shoulder to shoulder with the build team.

So, why is this important? Because if you ask your designer, “Hey, we like the sink here, but what if we made an integrated functional sink in the countertop?”
Okay? All the designer has to do is text their colleague or call their colleague or email their colleague in the design-build firm and say, “Hey, a client is considering this change. We haven’t started building yet. Our agreement—remember back to the whole thing about having a very clear agreement at the beginning and the scope of work specified that the sink is gonna be here—now they’re thinking here. So, before we get to a change order, that’s gonna happen during construction, tell me now, what do we think it’ll cost to put the sink there?”

Cool. The builder, the head of construction, in our case, Mustafa, would tell the designer, “Oh yeah, it’ll be… we have the plumber. It’ll be another half day for the plumber to put it over there. There’ll be another $750 or something like that, plus the increased cost of the fabrication of your countertop.”

So, say the whole thing will be, I don’t know… it’ll cost $1,250 if they want to put the sink over there. Cool. The designer then goes back to the homeowner and says, “Hey, we like the sink here. We love it over here. The place where you love it, it’ll be $1,250 additional dollars. What do you think?”

Fantastic. The homeowner can make a decision right there. They don’t have a gun to their face. They’re not in the middle of construction. They can plan for it, they can allocate for it, and a decision like that can be the determining factor in whether or not they go for a $6,000 countertop or a $4,500 countertop.
‘Cause maybe they want to keep their budget all in as a certain number, but we know this in advance, and now we can plan for it. So, that’s the advantage. That’s one of the many advantages of working in design-build.

And so, with regards to permitting and streamlining that process and streamlining the approval process, the DOB, Landmark Preservation Commission, and budgeting it—it just makes a lot of sense.
The only projects that I’ve worked on where I feel design-build was not always the best model with regards to being advantageous to the homeowner… I’d say are like ground-up construction in certain places where you might want to just work with an architect and then a construction team, and that kind of thing.

That’s fine, and we work all the time as just GCs as well. A lot of architects and designers come to us just to do the build because they trust us to be able to analyze the plans and price them accurately and just use our build team. Of course, you also get the added… if you come to us just to do the build,

So, let’s say you’re already working with a designer or an architect on your kitchen, and you’re just looking for a build team. You can come to us and you get all of our execution, all of our installation team, plus the added layers of project management of Mustafa and our interior design services, which can help bolster the services you already have with your designer or your architect.

So, people use us for that as well, but to maximize our benefit, most people use us as a design-build firm. And again, it’s to control costs and have the most efficient and effective build process as possible from beginning to end. The design-bid-build model has some advantages in some ways for certain kinds of projects, but if budget and time are a significant consideration, it’s very hard to beat the design-build model.

Because the design-bid-build model, where you’re working with a designer or an architect who is fully independent from any understanding of build costs, is going to work with you on your dream kitchen or whatever with no idea what little things here and there might add to the total cost, and it’s very hard to control budgets that way.
Most of the time, you end up losing a lot of time by getting the feedback from the builders once they’ve bid on those plans, and then going back to the drawing board and having to re-investigate the whole design again. It’s like starting from… sometimes, it can be almost like starting from square one.

So the design-build process avoids that.

Bella Bennett: Yeah. Yeah. Beautiful. Perfect. So these were my questions for you today. Before we wrap up, Zak, is there anything else you’d like to add?

Zak Van Buren: No. We’ve covered a lot of ground. There are thousands of areas to explore in this field. I think we’ll be doing that moving forward. But yeah, with regards to kitchens, I think we’ve laid out a lot for homeowners to consider. And again, we’re an open book. Homeowners should consider using us as a resource.

I spend, I don’t know… I don’t want to say half my week, but a good part of my week is spent in conversations with people who will never be a good fit for both of us to work together, either for budgetary, geographic, or other aspirational reasons. I’m always keen to have a conversation and share my experience with people because I hate to hear of projects going awry, and it’s easy for projects to go awry, and I think it’s easy to manage them so that they don’t, as long as those things are set up on the front end.

But you’ve got to get things right. You’ve got to find an experienced team, yeah, that clearly looks like they have both experience in New York City and a commitment to staying in New York City—that this is where they’re gonna work. Because word of mouth is everything. Our reputations are everything.

We live in the age of very easy access for people to opine on their experience with you online and in very public forums. And I respect that. I understand that. And I think by and large, for people who are good at what they do, it’s a good thing. Because it’s gonna demonstrate our competency.

And it’s gonna make sure that you do things right. So yeah, finding a reputable firm is important, and understanding that comes with a cost—everything has a cost. And there are different ways of structuring projects. So, to get back to those early conversations and the ones I mentioned earlier, that don’t necessarily have to do with projects that I end up getting involved with,

One of the biggest reasons why I might not get involved with a project, or why NYC Design Build might not get involved with a project, is because the clients’ priorities might not mesh well with a design-build firm with the amount of experience that we have. For example, if you’re living in a part of the city where property values are not as high as other parts and you’re doing very superficial changes, and your budget is, let’s say, whatever it might be… I might clearly tell you, “Look, you could hire a design-build firm, but it’s gonna take you a very long time. It’s gonna take you a longer period of time to get a good return on that investment.”

If it’s a place that you’re looking to flip or something like that, yeah, you might want to just work with an interior designer and a contractor, ’cause you’re just doing a facelift and that kind of thing. So, all those kinds of conversations, any homeowner should be having with their builder.

And it should be really a conversational dialogue where both parties should feel like they’re solidifying and confirming that it’s a good fit for both—geographically, scope of work, costs, and all that kind of stuff. So, yeah, there’s a lot to consider. I’m sure that future conversations will be going into that, but I think you asked a lot of great questions and I think we got a lot out on the table today.

Bella Bennett: Thank you so much, Zak, for sharing your insight and experience today, and that was a very insightful and enlightening conversation. We covered so many valuable points that really helped people feel more confident and informed about kitchen remodels, especially here in New York. And to everyone watching or listening, I hope you’re walking away with ideas and inspiration you can actually use.

If you’d like to learn more or get in touch with Zak and NYC Design Build, you can find their website link in the description below. Thanks again, and we’ll see you next time.