Helios Design Group

The heart of our work is creative problem solving, from the siting of buildings to the most graceful angle for a sill. We listen carefully to our clients, making sure we understand your needs and dreams, and bring to bear our years of experience with different ways of looking at a problem. Problems may be aesthetic, functional, or material – good design marries all three.We begin by meeting with you to discuss your building or site, what you hope to accomplish, your constraints, and your dreams. You let us know who you are and what’s important to you, and learn a bit about who we are.We’ll review codes and regulations, particularly zoning, which may impact the project, make drawings of the existing conditions, and set to work sketching ideas.We spend a lot of time in conversation with you as the design develops, using words, sketches, and the miraculous 3-d drawing capabilities of our drafting software to help convey ideas and options.The construction period itself can be stressful. We like to be present throughout, meeting regularly with you and the builder on site to keep an eye on construction, solve problems, and notice opportunities arising that weren’t noticed when the building was just an image, or the existing structure was hidden behind decades of wallpaper.All our design is done with an eye to sustainability. We make it our business to understand how green design actually works, to separate the exciting but wobbly idea from sound practice. For the time being, really good insulation is where you get the most bang for you buck in energy conservation, but we’re also up on solar energy and hot water systems, wind energy, geothermal, high-efficiency heating systems, and the like.