A few years back I ran a weekly roundup of houses for a small design blog, the kind of post where you scroll through five homes, each with eight or nine pictures and a paragraph about the architect. One Thursday a studio from Portugal sent me a cliff-top house that stopped me cold. Board-formed concrete, a long horizontal window that framed nothing but sea, a pool that seemed to tip over the edge of the rock, and an interior so calm it looked like it had been designed by someone who had never owned a pair of shoes. I put it at the top of the post and wrote something gushing about how it sat in the landscape.
A reader emailed two days later, quite politely, to ask when it had been finished, because she was going to be in the area and wanted to drive past. I wrote to the studio. They wrote back, cheerfully, that it hadn’t been built yet. The client was still arranging the financing. Every image I’d published was a rendering.
How it happens
I didn’t feel tricked, exactly. The studio hadn’t claimed the house was finished; I just hadn’t asked, and nothing in the images gave it away. That was the part that rattled me. I’d been looking at architecture photographs most of my working life and I couldn’t tell.
It turns out this is completely ordinary now. Architects make images of their projects for clients, for planning committees and for competitions long before anything is built, and the best of those images are made by specialists. A practice will often bring in a studio offering architectural visualization services to produce the final set, building the house as a detailed digital model and then lighting and photographing it, virtually, with the same care a real architectural photographer would. When those images are good, and a lot of them are very good, they travel. They get sent to blogs like mine, pinned, reposted, collected into “dream home” lists, and somewhere along the way the caption that said “proposed” falls off.
Learning to look
After the cliff house I got a bit obsessive about spotting renderings, partly out of embarrassment and partly because it’s genuinely interesting. Some tells are easy once you know them. Renderings tend to be very clean. Real finished houses have a hose left on the terrace, a scuff on the skirting, a slightly crooked cushion that the photographer gave up on. Renderings often have too-perfect weather, the soft late sun that real photographers wait weeks for. The plants are frequently a giveaway too, because in a rendering a newly planted garden can be shown at ten years’ maturity, so you get mature olive trees around a house whose concrete is visibly fresh.
People are another clue. They’re either missing entirely, which is common, or they’re oddly posed, walking with purpose toward nothing in particular, or blurred in a way that real motion blur never quite manages. And then there’s the light inside. A real interior photographed in daylight usually has a window that blows out a little or a corner that’s darker than the photographer wanted. Renderings can balance all of it perfectly, which is lovely to look at and slightly too good to be true.
That said, the top studios have learned all of these tricks and deliberately undo them. I’ve seen renderings with a wet patch on the terrace and a coffee cup left on the kitchen island precisely so they don’t look rendered. So these days I mostly just ask.
Why I stopped worrying and started labelling
My first instinct was that renderings shouldn’t be on a design blog at all, or only in a separate category for “concepts.” I changed my mind fairly quickly, though. Plenty of the most interesting architecture never gets built. Competition entries, ambitious private houses that run out of money, public buildings that get cancelled after an election. If I only published finished work, my readers would miss some of the boldest ideas being made, and a well-made image of an unbuilt house can tell you as much about an architect’s thinking as a photograph of a finished one.
So I started asking every studio two questions before publishing: is this built, and if not, who made the images. Most of them answered happily, and quite a few were proud of the visualizers they worked with. I began adding a short line under each project, “Images: renderings, project under construction,” or “Photographs by” and a name. Readers liked it. A couple wrote to say they’d always wondered and appreciated being told.
What the images are really for
Talking to architects about all this taught me something I hadn’t thought about. For them, these pictures aren’t decoration. A good rendering is how a client finally understands the house they’re paying for, how a planning committee sees what a new building does to a street, and how a competition jury tells two similar schemes apart. One architect told me she uses renderings mostly to make decisions, not to sell anything. She’ll have the same living room rendered in oak and then in walnut, at noon and at dusk, and it’s the comparison, not the beauty of any single image, that settles the argument with the client.
That changed how I look at the pictures too. When I see a rendering now, I find myself wondering what decision it was made to help with, which view the client must have worried about, and what got changed after they saw it.
The cliff house, eventually
The Portuguese house did get built, about two years after I’d published it. The studio sent me the photographs, real ones this time, by a photographer whose name I made sure to credit. It was close to the renderings, remarkably close, but not identical. The concrete was a little warmer than the images had shown, the pool edge a bit less dramatic, and there was a small, perfectly ordinary railing along the cliff side that the renderings had politely left out. I ran the photographs side by side with the original images, clearly labelled, and it became one of the most read posts I ever did.