Richard Olander

Anna and I worked with Richard on the remodel of our bungalow in Studio City. We would recommend him highly, especially for remodels of older existing homes. Richard has a gift for creating new functional and beautiful spaces from the footprint of older homes like ours. His talent for seamless incorporation of second story additions was the key to us hiring him for our project.
We greatly appreciated his professionalism throughout the whole project. We also found our excellent contractor wih his help. Richard was always conscious of our budget. He frequently provided advice by emails and stopped by regularly to check on our house while it was under construction to make sure everything was going well.
Check out the before and after pics.

We cannot recommend Richard Olander more highly! We have a historic Paul Williams home and after interviewing many architects, Richard was the ONLY person we wanted to work with on our remodel. His reputation is stellar in our area and he came highly recommended by many friends who have worked with him. Our project has been a long process from inception to completion and Richard was a pleasure to work with every step of the way. Throughout the design process he is considerate of your taste and budget and presents many options and suggestions to help you fine tune every detail. While he’s confident in his recommendations, he is always flexible and amenable to making changes. He is the consummate professional always getting back to you promptly (with thoughtful feedback when needed); delivers when and what he promises; and we appreciated how collaborative he was with our contractors on every issue. Richard always makes us feel like a priority. Most importantly, he genuinely cared about our project and is truly proud of the outcome. We have eagerly referred him to many of our family and friends… all of whom love what he did with our home. We could not be happier with our experience.

We had heard great things about Richard Olander for years. He has designed a number of beautiful homes in our Studio City, CA neighborhood and we had always admired how charming and original each home was, as well as how organically each seemed to fit within their different respective lots.
When we finally decided to take the plunge and remodel, Richard was our only choice and we couldn’t have been happier. He is an excellent architect who worked with us to create and customize a home that suited the needs of our growing family, while remaining within a budget that we could afford. Even though we initially couldn’t decide between a two-​story renovation or a one-​story extension, Richard was extremely patient and drew plans for both options to help us make our decision (which was to go up). And he made sure to design around the mature trees on our lot, which we couldn’t think of cutting down.
He was someone that we could depend on to be creative, knowledgeable, professional, helpful and supportive at every step along the 9 month process. His recommendations and instincts were always right and we had many engineers and inspectors say how much they appreciate working on houses created by Richard because they know that he does such a thorough job in drawing up the plans.
We moved back into the house 2 weeks ago and only now truly begin to appreciate just how good Richard is. As we move from room to room (chasing a 3 year old along the way), the space feels so intuitive and natural. Nothing feels out of place and there isn’t anything we would change.
We wholeheartedly recommend Richard to anyone looking for a great architect. We even have strangers coming up to the house and asking for Richard’s information because they love the originality and organic «fit» of the house within the neighborhood. In a world where every developer wants to build a Tuscan mansion, Richard’s designs stand apart and retain the charm and personality of the neighborhood.

Richard designed our dream house and we could not have been happier with him or the house he designed. We was very easy to get along with, knowledgeable, timely, and reasonably priced. He navigated us through the complicated and tricky permit process in Santa Monica with record speed because his plans were so good, well thought-​out, and he was so familiar with the details of Santa Monica requirements. He made himself available throughout the construction process and was a quick problem solver if issues/​problems arose with our contractor. I have and will recommend him to anyone without reservation.