One very key trait that your architect should have is a current handle on constructions costs.  Your architect should be experienced working with a wide gambit of general contractors ranging from all points of the cost spectrum.  Every home remodel requiring the help of an architect to design inevitably goes through a cost reduciton phase.  It’s very easy to throw in everything including the kitchen sink (literally) and come up with a great design for a home remodel that you can’t afford.

If you have a good architect they’ll be able to tell you roughly how much something would cost relative to the entire project budget.  If you have a GREAT architect they’ll guide you along during the design phase to help you identify your highest priorities and separate out what would be considered nice to have elements that will optionally be undertaken if there is room in the budget.

My wife and I had a wonderful architect, but the one thing that he didn’t have was a sharpened pencil in the area of cost accuracy.  When we received the initial bids back from the pool of contractors that he personally had worked with and could vouch for, even he was surprised in hearing some of the numbers - which is not a good sign.  The cost accuracy game is one of those classic chicken and the egg puzzles.  You can’t get a bearing on cost until you have a design.  You can’t build a design without somehow getting an idea of what things cost.  I recommend doing two things to help narrow down cost accuracy so that you don’t waste your time soliciting bids from general contractors or trying to budget doing the work yourself:

1. pick an architect that has a good track record for cost accuracy, ask him or her how far off have they been on their estimates and what the bids coming back from their previous clients have been in relation to their estimate
2. find comparables for home remodels, we took my wife’s coworker’s remodel to get some bearing of cost to understand the price per square foot and what level of finishes that included
3. when you have preliminary designs done discuss your designs with prospective GCs to get their take on what a realistic range would be, this way you know that your architect is not designing ill afforded plans in a vacuum