Establishing what the council will and won't allow: character, flood, demolition control, height, setbacks, site cover, overlays.
Somebody has told you your house is pre-1947 and you have been trying since to work out what that means for you. What you find is either a council code written for planners or an opinion from somebody with money riding on the answer.
Here is the shape of it. The overlay is a mapped thing. Your address is either in it or it is not, and you can check that yourself in about two minutes. A great deal of inner Brisbane is in it — Paddington, Red Hill, Camp Hill, Norman Park, Wooloowin, Coorparoo. Being in it is not a prohibition on anything. It is a set of rules about where and how, and most of what people actually want to do sits on the permitted side of them.
Two questions decide most projects: whether you can remove or alter what faces the street, and how much height you have to work with. The rest — setbacks, site cover, flood — is checkable in an afternoon by anyone willing to read.
Some sites will not take the project you imagine. Better you hear it in week one than after a design fee.
Brisbane's inner suburbs sit under character overlays, and houses built before 1947 carry protections around demolition and how the street-facing form can change. Knowing this before designing shapes the scheme correctly the first time. Discovering it afterwards means redesigning at your own cost.
The particular dread of finding out too late. People hear the horror stories — the neighbour whose extension was refused, the year lost to an appeal — and the fear of the invisible rule is one of the strongest motivations for engaging a professional at all.
The design is drawn to the client's wishes and then meets the city plan for the first time at lodgement. Refusal, or a redesign, or a long negotiation nobody budgeted for. Occasionally a site that never permitted the project in the first place.
Most of what I do is Brisbane houses — Queenslanders, workers' cottages, post-war brick, and the well-meaning additions people have made to all of them over the years. Character overlay and demolition control in the inner suburbs shape a design more than anyone expects, and they are far better understood at the start than discovered halfway through. It is not a prohibition on doing anything. It is a set of rules about where and how, and I know which arguments this council entertains.
Treat it as arithmetic rather than as a rule. In most low density residential areas the City Plan allows a building height of 9.5 metres and two storeys, measured from ground level. Under the National Construction Code a habitable room needs a 2.4 metre ceiling, while a bathroom, laundry or hallway can drop to 2.1. So the new lower level needs 2.4 metres clear plus the floor structure above it, then the existing house's own floor-to-ceiling height, then its roof. A steep gable can take three metres or more on its own. That is why some Queenslanders raise comfortably and others do not.
Slope, roof pitch and ground level. Height is measured from the ground below the building, so on a block that falls away the downhill side reaches the limit first and governs the whole design. A shallow-pitched roof leaves far more room than a steep one. Separately, the character provisions deal with appearance rather than envelope — how the new lower level is treated at the front, and how it reads from the street. The envelope decides whether it is possible. The character code decides what it can look like.
Not without approval, where demolition control applies and the house dates from 1946 or earlier. Full demolition is assessed by council as a development application, and the test turns broadly on whether the house still shows traditional character and contributes to the street, and on whether it is structurally capable of repair. Wanting a different house is not a ground. You will also hear the older term demolition control precinct, from Brisbane's previous city plan — if an agent says DCP, demolition control probably applies. Partial demolition is far more permissive: taking the rear off for an addition is routine, because the protection is aimed at what the street sees.
Brisbane City Council publishes a free FloodWise Property Report for every address, alongside a Flood Awareness Map. Get it before you buy, not after. It covers river, creek and overland flow and storm tide, and each behaves differently on the ground. Flood affectation is not a reason not to build — a great deal of good Brisbane housing sits on flood-affected land — but it changes minimum floor levels, what the space beneath a raised house may be used for, your insurance and your build cost. Read it before the design starts.
There is no single number, and any number you find online is probably for somebody else's site. Two sets of rules apply: the City Plan's dwelling house provisions and the Queensland Development Code's siting standards. Both change with the height of the wall, so a taller wall must sit further from the boundary, and both change with lot size, zone and whether a small lot code applies. In character streets the front setback is also influenced by what the neighbours do, because the rhythm of the street is part of what is protected.
If you would rather start small, the First Sketch Session is two hours at your place. You keep the sketches, and there is no obligation afterwards.