Turning what's in your head into a clear written statement of what your house has to do.
You're looking for how to write a brief for an architect, and there are templates everywhere. Rooms, sizes, must-haves, nice-to-haves, a budget line, a date. What they won't do is tell me what your house has to do.
A list of rooms is a list of answers to a question nobody has asked yet. Four bedrooms, two bathrooms and an open-plan living area describes about half the houses in Brisbane, and none of them is yours.
The brief worth writing is closer to a description of how you actually live. Tell me about your Saturday morning — who's awake first, where they go, where the light needs to be. Tell me what you avoid doing in the house you have now, and why. That last one is usually the real problem, stated backwards. And don't worry about writing it well. Getting it out of your head is my job as much as yours.
Don't start with rooms. Start with your Saturday morning, who's awake, where they go, where the light is.
A written brief we both work from: what the project has to achieve, what you're keeping, the real budget and the real timeframe. It becomes the measure everything later is tested against.
The moment it stops being a private hope and becomes a shared project. If two of you have been imagining different houses, this is where you find out — over a table, with time to talk.
On your own the brief tends to live in your head and come out in fragments as the design develops. For a small, clear job that's manageable. On anything larger it's how scope quietly grows.
The brief is a living document we keep coming back to. I'll help you write it — that isn't homework I set you, it's a conversation I lead, and I'll ask about things you'd never think to mention. Written down, it becomes what every later decision gets tested against, so when something genuinely new comes up we can both see that it's new.
In four parts. What the house has to achieve, described as behaviour rather than as rooms — where you eat, where the kids land after school, what it's like with six people in it. What's wrong with what you have, specifically. The real budget and the real timeframe. And the constraints you already know: the site, the neighbours, the tree.
Yes, and most work fine as prompt lists. Where they fall short is on the three things that actually shape a design: the order of priority, what you'd trade, and the true budget. A template will let you tick twelve must-haves. It won't make you rank them, and ranking is the part that does the work.
What you're keeping, and why. The rooms and details you genuinely love, as distinct from the ones you're simply used to. Whether you'll live through the build or move out. Anything you know about past work. And your instinct about the two big Brisbane moves — raising the house, or extending at the rear.
Yes, with a sentence under each saying what you're responding to. An image on its own is ambiguous — I can't tell whether you like the light, the joinery, the ceiling height or the fact that it's clearly a holiday. A dozen annotated images beat a board of two hundred. Send the ones you dislike too, and say why.
Write your briefs separately, without conferring, then read each other's. The overlaps are the project. The gaps are the conversation you were always going to have, and it's far better had here, with me in the room to turn it into a design question.
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.
