The Twin Cities is lacking in good architects except for more contemporary homes. Jeff Murphy (Murphy & Co) is probably the best for traditional but they do mostly upper end homes.

Others to consider; Jon Monson @ Landschute, Peter Eschutche (sp?), and Marc Sloot @ SALA.

Marc is a great architect, is well versed in energy efficiency, does a wide range of homes in different price ranges, is exceptionally enjoyable to be around, has a good eye for design and he renovated his own home so can relate to you doing some of the work yourself. I've worked with him on a couple of projects and can highly recommend him.

You've got plenty of time so visit a lot of Parade homes this spring and note who the architects are for the ones you like.

We used Houzz and the AIA website to find architects in our area. I agree that many architects seem to market to high end markets but, from my observations, those are residential focus architects and need high-end projects to make their work profitable.

We found that architects who do mainly small commercial with some residential projects are more than willing to work with us "middle to upper middle" people. The ones we met with made us feel completely comfortable with our budget and expectations. The architects we considered were sole proprietors with no or very limited staff. The architects we interviewed told us they love doing residential but there just isn't enough business to feed the family. Commercial projects pay the bills.

And this is not what you asked about, but please consider getting a builder involved early in the process. We were amazed and thrilled with what our builder 'brought to the table'. The caveat to this, though, is you will likely have to commit to a builder before he/she will agree to attend the design meetings. That is only fair, in my opinion, as the meetings we had were typically 3 hours, about every 2-3 weeks - so a lot of time devoted to our project.

Best of luck in your project!

Thanks for the reccomendations.

I'm pretty sure I will general the job as I have lots of experience in construction. So we don't need the architect to over view so much as we need a great design we can afford.

I was going to recommend SALA too.

I didn't connect that doing some DIY meant no GC...sorry! You likely have the experience to "see" how the design will be framed, etc. That is one of the viewpoints our builder brought to the table. With our design there were a couple of instances where the architect and builder had to talk through how the design element would be constructed. We were glad the conversation happened in the design process and not when the framers were standing there wondering how they were going to build that part!

Minneapolis area is full of talented architects who do residential work. Not sure why opaone said what she said. The names above are certainly good ones and worth contacting.

Contact the local office of The American Institute of Architects, AIA Minneapolis for their referral list: https://www.aia-mn.org/about/chapters/aia-minneapolis/

Drive around the area in which you intend to build and find houses that are similar to the scope and style of your project. Inquire to who their architect is and start talking to those architects. Architects do a variety of size projects; I tell people I have done projects from playhouse to linear accelerator rooms.