Finding an architect

So how do we find an architect to build our tea house? It really needs to be someone local, but the Maryland suburbs of Washington DC are not exactly a hotbed of modern architecture. We've taken many walks around Bethesda, where many of the 60 or 70 year old colonial revival houses are being torn down. They are commonly replaced by something like this:



Not very interesting or inspiring. It is very out of character and scale of the neighborhood (though I suppose this might change eventually if all the new houses look like this). But we did find a few interesting houses. The house below was being built about 10 years ago:



What is unique about this house is it's reference to the existing neighborhood, while incorporating clean modern lines. The roof-line is reminiscent of the old "Lock houses" along the C&O canal. But by the time we were thinking about the tea house, this project had been finished for 5 years, and we had no idea who the architect was. But another, even larger scale project was gong up just a few blocks away:


We watched this project from the very beginning, and saw all the details that went into it, including the steel frame, and soaring roof-line and glass walls. It is really a stone, glass and steel house, and has many of the elements we were looking for. And this construction site even had the name of the architect: David Jameson. A quick search on google revealed that this was the same architect who built the Modern Lock House above as well. So we decided to contact this David Jameson, and see if we could convince him to work on a much smaller project.