Amy Vander Heyden Architects

Amy Vander Heyden Architects 🏠 Homeowners | 🏗️ Builders | 👷 Contractors
🚀 Need Building Plans?
🙌 Done For You Architecture & Engineering
www.buildeverythingepic.com

Full Time: Mom | Wife | Architect | Ironman Finisher
​Side Hustle: Leader of Industry Change

Old Hustles: Construction Manager Fortune 500 Company &
In-House Architect 8-figure & 9-figure Builds

08/23/2025

🚧 Built in Los Gatos. Powered by EPIC.

We recently completed this custom home build — including architectural, engineering, permitting, and systems integration — from concept to reality.

Designed for real life.
Backed by real systems.
Delivered by a real team.

If you’re a developer, investor, or contractor who needs trusted plans fast (without the typical headaches)…
🎯 This is what we do.

🔗 See the property in the video/photos below
📅 Book a free consult → www.buildeverythingepic.com/schedule/15min
📥 Refer a client → Just DM or email [email protected]

—

Amy Felix, Architect
✅ Ivy League
✅ Fortune 500 CM
✅ 8- & 9-figure builds
✅ Speaker @ AIA 2023
And now: Fully focused on building smarter, faster, and more human-centered spaces through EPIC.

07/24/2024

I'm really grateful that I have already gotten past a certain point in my career. I remember when I was starting out and there were so many firsts all the time. First time a certain fire requirement came up on a project. First time the planning department was giving us a really hard time. The first time you go through each issue, it seems like the project's not going to happen.

But what's nice is that as the projects go on, you get more approvals, you get more projects, the years pass by, you start to realize there's almost always a solution for everything. It's compromising, it's communicating clearly, but the good thing is that projects can get built. And that's what's exciting for me is that when you have a good team and you have the right people in place who know how to professionally and persuasively present what you're trying to do, that's when you can be effective with your building project.

It makes me think with one of our Los Gatos houses. Even after we got our approved set, in the middle of construction, our client decided that he wanted to make a change. You know what? No problem. They started making the change. I worked with the superintendent who was on the job site. We shifted the drawings, we moved the mechanical units to the roof, we put up a screening.

At first it got a little dicey, but then at the end of the day, we were able to get the neighbors involved, get them on our side, show our compliance. And once we could clearly and effectively communicate that, not only in words, but with documentation to the building department, we got it signed off.

07/24/2024

I have never agreed with people going into a project with fuzzy outlooks when they say, all right, it's going to be about this much. And it's on an hourly basis. I also have never understood like many clients, why some architects price their work based on the construction costs of the job because if you're involved early, like I prefer to be, you do not know the construction costs of the job...

07/24/2024

I think what's really good about our system is that it helps transparently communicate across our team what we're doing. From the very beginning when we create a proposal, we're outlining what the tasks are and what the deliverables are. And so we use TeamGantt and that way we know who's assigned to a task, when it's due, and what the actual requirement is.

Plus, we link all of our Dropbox files right there, so it's easy. We're not duplicating everything and uploading, downloading, or sending countless emails where things get lost. Each task, because there are dozens, probably hundreds of tasks for every project, thousands on a big one, you have to know who's handling it and where it is.

And so, whether you're in Google Chat or email, it's not as effective as being organized on one string.

07/24/2024

Yes, so I am an Ironman triathlete and I've completed one full Ironman, one half Ironman, and I definitely will do another one someday. When I did my first one, I had seen a video and I saw this video, of the Hoyt family, and it was very inspirational about how this dad helped his son complete a triathlon, even though his son was disabled. And I thought, that's awesome. And for some context, I've always been a marathon runner. My mom's a marathon runner. Since I was a little kid... I've loved running. It's one of my favorite things to do. But also, I love that I brought to the Ironman, just my philosophy that I've used for a lot of things in life, is that if I can do a little bit, if I can take the next step, then I can make a lot of progress over time.

And so when people train for an Ironman, they often train for a year plus. So around nine or 10 months before the Ironman, which was in the summertime. So coming into the fall and like September, I said, I'm going to start training. I'm going to get serious. And what I'm going to do is every weekend, I'm going to go a little farther on all three.

So, you know, maybe I started out and I did like a four mile run. and I might swim 20 laps and then I might bike 10 miles. Now for context, what you're trying to get to is you have to do a 2.4 mile swim. That is a lot of laps if you're training in a pool. And then you have to do 112 miles on a bike, which I really underestimated the amount of hills I should keep in my training program.

And then you run a full marathon, 26.2 miles. Back to back to back, nonstop. So these events take all day. You start first thing in the morning, basically a little after sunrise, and then the goal is to finish by midnight... is usually around the cutoff time... so it can be after dark by the time you're coming in and seeing everyone at the finish line.

And so every weekend, partly outside, partly at the gym, depending on what I felt like, I would go a little farther. And I did this all fall and it was really great because then I remember telling people when they say, do you want to hang out? I'm like, I've got to go bike like 80 miles. I'm just like, what? You've got to go bike 80 miles.

I'm like, yeah, I got to bike 80 miles. And so I just kept going a little farther and a little farther and a little farther. And the great thing is that confidence comes from that. And then during the spring, I just kept my conditioning up. And then in the summer I was able to complete a full Ironman triathlon.

And I think my time was around 16 hours, which was really respectable. And looking back now, I think too, like 16 hours straight of nonstop working out. It was a blast. I definitely will do it again.

07/24/2024

I love small scale developers and developers that are just starting out because they're passionate about getting things built. And so am I. And I think the idea of team building is so important there. So one of my favorite things that we do is that we offer a feasibility study. This is great because if someone's thinking about doing a project, this is where you start.

And whether you've talked to the building department or the planning department or not, This is the place to start. In Lafayette, there was a person who was doing a custom home, and he had this huge lot. It was a hillside lot, and a lot of people build really nice estate homes in that area. But there are a lot of regulations.

Some things that come up in those areas that don't apply in traditional lots, or less restricted lots, are things like story polls. And this is where you have to put up those polls and all the neighbors get to weigh in and they see... is this really something we want built? And at the end of the day, if you can comply with the regulations, you usually can get it built.

So we were able to work with him and find out information about the lot, including some of the civil engineering options, work with him about getting the survey details on where the property line is, and getting written responses from the planning department about the possibility of where he could place his home on that lot.

And the good thing is that was enough for him and he was able to purchase the property and move forward with building that project. Another one that we did was a little south of us and this was another huge lot and some developers were looking at it because they wanted to build a whole neighborhood of custom homes.

And they needed to advertise the lot because they actually didn't want to develop it themselves, but they needed something that was persuasive and interesting. And so they hired us to produce renderings, but not just graphics without any basis. So we did do some research to find out what's possible. And then we did produce the photorealistic renderings, some of which they even like so much they put on a billboard as part of their marketing.

I also love working with realtors because a lot of times they know who's building stuff. And so sometimes realtors will send me a text and they'll say... look, I've got this person, they want to do this project, but we need some help. We need to know if it's feasible or not. And so this is where I can step in, jump on a call, get connected.

And the feasibility study is the answer. It doesn't totally tell you exactly what you can build because obviously that's a long process to get approvals, but it's a great place to get a first impression and people have used it as a tool to be able to make an offer on a property.

07/24/2024

99 percent of the time when I talk to someone and I say, okay, what's the schedule for your project? Most people want to start yesterday... but for whatever reason they haven't started and here they are now ready to go either with some external or internal pressure to really get this project going.

And so we're used to that. That's just the way it is in the industry but what's nice is that we have a team and so it's not just me, you know, it used to only be me... but then I got too much work to keep up with and the good thing now is that other people count on me and so by having steady consistent referrals and projects coming in And things getting built we have work and we have people ready. And so this means that we're looking forward to our next project.

Yes, are we busy? Of course, because things are going well. But we're also scaling and we also continually are looking for people that we want to join our team. So we also always have recruiting in mind because we are very ambitious and looking to grow this company.

07/24/2024

We can't always know every cost at the outset of a job, but when you're an expert in the industry, you can start to see the patterns. And you can know, okay, for certain jobs, structural engineering is going to be required. For certain jobs, at least you want to be thinking about, will a civil engineer be required?

Will a landscape architect be required? Sometimes consultants are required, like an arborist, if you have trees on your site. And so in my proposal, I like to outline not only the architectural scope of work, which me and my team do personally, but also all of our partner companies. And when we say, okay, we're going to need a structural engineer.

We let the client know right up ahead of time, this is coming your way. And we also have learned how to be efficient for our clients because with the work I've done at other companies, when I've been on large multimillion dollar contracts... I still think it's important to not be wasteful. I just am passionate about being efficient with how money is spent, no matter what the amount is.

And so when there's going to be an expense, like engineering, for example, it doesn't make sense to bring the structural engineer on if we're in the beginning schematic daydreaming phase where we're playing with the layout, changing the massing, changing the location on the site, because then we'll drive up the iterations that's required.

And the sooner you bring engineers in, the more uncertainty there is. If you can wait a little bit, just till the end of schematic design, sometimes probably during design development, you can bring them in and they can have a clear idea of what's going on. And so we can give our customers ballpark ideas of roughly what it will cost from the beginning, and they know it's coming, but then we don't actually contract these engineers until we know what's going on. This is also really great because some projects, unfortunately, don't happen. And so if people are just testing out a feasibility of something, trying to check with the planning department if it's even going to work, maybe funding falls through on their end, different things happen, especially in the development space.

And so this way you're not putting a bunch of money out before you really need to when you're ready to pull the trigger.

07/24/2024

Super grateful for the people who have supported my journey. Learn more about it here...

07/24/2024

We're doing a church project and what's great is they knew they had several people on their ownership team that knew that this was a big project they were taking on with doing an addition and a remodel and it's commercial work. And they said, we need experts. We want a whole team. We don't want to piece it out.

We don't want to try to do a homemade deal here. And so they hired us to do everything. So we brought on all of the engineers -mechanical, electrical, plumbing, structural, civil, and of course we cover the architectural services. And the reason this has been beneficial for them and why they are so happy with this decision is because we handle the communication. We handle all the contracts.

We handle invoicing. There's a lot of accounting and admin and logistical work that goes into coordinating an entire team of people. And especially in terms of distributing information. We've learned that also having effective meetings is so important. We don't like to have meetings for no reason, but on a big job, if you have a weekly coordination meeting where all of the design team and the owners, and ideally the contractor, if it's design build or at least design assist, are present, we can effectively work through issues week by week by week.

We track it on an agenda. We send out the meeting notes and then it's done and it's resolved and no one has to debate about it. We don't have to send long emails... we can just know that it was handled and we have a record. So, then when decisions do change, we look back at... "Oh, what were the considerations?"

Okay. I understand that duct won't fit through this chase, you know, different electrical loads might not fit with the existing capacity, but people can just let go of all their worries about coordinating. Think about even trying to coordinate a party. You know... you have to contact all the guests, you have to set up the location, think about where they're parking, what are you going to eat, what are you going to drink, who's going to bring the decorations.

There's a lot of work that goes into events and really creating a drawing set, a good one, is like hosting an event. And so we handle that for people so they can just focus on the big decisions that actually they need to make for their project.

Address

5506 Sean Circle
San Jose, CA
95123

Opening Hours

Monday 8am - 5pm
Tuesday 8am - 5pm
Wednesday 8am - 5pm
Thursday 8am - 5pm
Friday 8am - 5pm

Telephone

+16502041978

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