Bart Szoke Architect Inc

Bart did a great job putting together the drawings for our bungalow remodel. He is the real deal - professional but also talented. The drawings and permit application took nearly exactly the time he estimated. We had a few things missed or confused, but Bart fixed them once we noticed. We'd go back to him if we had another project.

We are very happy that we chose Bart to do the drawings for our renovation project. He was very knowledgeable and patient, working through all of our questions and revisions in a respectful manner. Our project was slightly unusual and Bart always came up with great solutions to ensure that the project was successful. He was also very helpful when our framers missed a very important structural detail in the early stages of construction. We can highly recommend his work.

Bart Szoke did a complete new house design for us for a very complex building site and home . It is a very challenging build and required addressing a lot of complicated structural building and design questions. The home that he designed is on a Ravine lot overlooking Lake Ontario.Because of the limitations of the ravine building site The architectural design needed to be very specialized with steel cantilevering to extend home space towards the lake. There are four levels to the back and curtainwall windows on first and second floors. The design details include radiant floor heat, wheelchair accessibility and an elevator for ageing in place! Bart Has a very quiet polite and gentle manner. Bart is very easy to work with and always was available for questions and very helpful with suggestions as we have continued to move through the build with the contractor and designer in order to help us achieve the home of our dreams. He also introduced us to his design colleague, Genevieve Lavoie Who has been an enourmously helpful part of his team. Our building contractor's comment was that in 25 years "he had never seen a better or more detailed set of building plans " than the ones created by Bart Szoke. I would highly recommend this architect for Any building project.

We got in touch with Bart because we wanted a full backyard reno, including replacing our kitchen wall with large glass doors, adding bleacher style steps down into the yard, replacing the lawn with a paved courtyard and adding a hot tub. For us, it was important that there was a flow to the garden, while keeping some of the existing features like the flowerbeds in place. Bart was friendly, approachable and thoughtful in his approach to the design. He talked through all aspects of the process with us (it was our first time doing a large project) and made us feel comfortable. We went through several altered plans before we found one that was approved by the city and us! We are absolutely delighted with the result and plan to work with Bart again in the future.

Working with Bart was a great experience. Highly recommended. He helped us brainstorm a number of options for our home renovation as we engaged him very early in the process. He was quite accommodating, in terms of flexibility in setting up meetings. We were also able to handle a lot of details over email which helped us to be efficient. Bart also offered to connect us with builders with whom he'd worked before, but there was no pressure to work with them. Once we did engage our builders, they commented that they were impressed with Bart's drawings, as they were among the most detailed that they've seen for a project of our size.

We have worked with Bart Szoke on three projects—a third floor master suite conversion, a basement renovation after underpinning, and a complete remodel of the first floor. We acted as our own contractor. We would, without reservation, recommend Bart’s considerable experience and excellent design skills. We first went to Bart on a friend’s recommendation simply because we weren’t sure that what we were planning to do on the third floor made sense. This was a small project for him and yet he gave it his attention and was very patient answering our questions. As an architect, he was able to show, by way of argument as well as computer-drawn images, why what we wanted to do made more sense than we had thought. That was reassuring, but it was not really where the value of his contribution came. Taking down a wall or two and putting up a few new ones may sound very simple. We had a sense of the overall plan but as we have learned--now through three separate renovations--everything comes down to details. Bart made a whole set of recommendations, each of them small, but none of which we would have ever thought about ourselves or which the different trades we worked with would have considered. It made the end product so much more successful. For the second project, when we lowered and underpinned our basement, we went back to Bart to get him to help us come up with a design for the new space. His work was again invaluable. Not only does the design work so much better than if we had tried to work this out ourselves, we found that having such well-thought out plans made the work go so much more smoothly. Once the structural work on the basement was done, we realized that we really had to deal with the third project, the ground floor. In the end we had to gut the whole floor--a daunting task, but one made so much easier by Bart’s guidance. The main design feature of this space was a very large siding glass door and a combined kitchen, dining, and living space. This new space has remade our house. We are very happy. Light fills the first floor now. The three areas work very well together, being distinct yet merging seamlessly with each other. We couldn’t have done this without an architect who was willing to listen, who understood old houses, and who was willing to help us maximize the impact of our relatively limited budget. Three renovations over a few years take their tolls on one financially (on all three projects the budgets were modest) and psychologically. Working with Bart minimized those tolls. Bart is a great advertisement for his profession. We know he was working on much larger projects than ours over this time, with less limited budgets, and yet we never felt he treated us as an afterthought. He was always attentive and quick to get back to us as the projects proceeded. Renovations are not cheap or easy. It is natural that one would think about trying to cut costs. What we learned from working with Bart is that one of those cost cutting measures should not be a good architect. You are already making a significant financial investment. In our experience if would be better to defer some wishes and hire an architect than to get everything one thought one wanted and find that the end product was disappointing because the overall layout wasn’t optimal or that one noticed so many unanticipated design problems that never got properly resolved and so compromise the end product. But not all architects will do what Bart did for us.

We hired Bart on the recommendation of a friend to draw up the designs for a significant renovation to our home. We had talked to a number of professionals about some of the key concerns we had about renovating an original home without making it look forced (or a frankenhouse, as I like to call it). He was the only person we spoke to who came to the table with viable solutions and he demonstrated an understanding of how to balance our needs with the existing blueprint of the house. Bart was also extremely patient with our many questions and concerns and was a great communicator throughout the process. We are thrilled with the blueprint he created for our new home and we can't wait to see the finished product.

We are in the process of renovating our Tri-Plex. We engaged Bart Szoke Architect to help us design, plan and execute our project. Their responsibility is extensive. It includes; All design, drawings, engineering, permitting (which included Committee of Adjustments submissions and hearings), project tendering, contractor selection and final build contract.

Bart and his colleagues designed a brand new house for my husband and I. We kept one wall and used the same footprint but that was all. Everything is new. We built a modern house with open spaces. We love it.

We are very happy with the work of Bart Szoke Architect as they did a great job! We wanted an extension built onto our house. Bart Szoke Architect did all the design work (including the walk out) and submitted all the permits to the city. I found Bart Szoke Architect through a colleague of mine that was getting renovations done and were very happy with the work done and highly recommended them to us. We talked to various companies; however, we found Bart Szoke Architect to be the best fit for us. The company is very well organized and detailed with their work which I believe to be very crucial in this field of work. They were also flexible to what we wanted and made changes based on that. In every possible way we are happy with the work done and had an amazing experience working with this company!

Working with Bart and his team on our second floor addition project has been a pleasure. After conducting an extensive search, we felt that Bart’s experience, knowledge and attention to detail would be the best fit for us. During the design process, Bart and his team have provided us with interesting and “out of the box” solutions for our challenging space. They are extremely professional and responsive and also worked hard to find a design that would work within our budget. We intend to continue working with Bart and his team in the future and we recommend them to our friends and colleagues.

A very large and complicated project with a laundry room, sun room additions, huge "man cave" with bar, entertainment area, wine cellar, steam bathroom...and more. Bart and his team were very creative and knowledgeable of current design trends and had a very high level of architectural and engineering expertise to complete designs that our original designer/architect thought were not possible. Bart and his team listen well, act quickly and are able to create what we had in mind into 3D renderings. All of their work was top notch and I highly recommend them for any residential project large or small.