Turning a wish list into a clear, written statement of what the project must do, what it will cost and when it needs to happen.
You are looking for a template, and there are plenty. Rooms, sizes, must-haves, nice-to-haves, a budget line and a date. Fill one in tonight. It is genuinely useful, it saves an hour of an architect's time and probably some of your money.
What it will not do is tell anyone what the 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 your days than a schedule of accommodation. Tell me about your Saturday mornings. Who is awake first, where they go, what they do, where the light needs to be at seven. Tell me what you avoid doing in the house you have now, and why. That last one is usually the real problem, stated backwards.
Write the brief before you hire anyone. You will pay less for it, and you will interview far better.
The Institute is explicit that helping formulate the brief is one of an architect's most important roles: pointing out what's possible in cost and design terms, asking the questions, making the suggestions. The brief becomes the basis of the agreement and the measure everything is later tested against.
The moment it becomes a shared project rather than a private hope. Two people who have been quietly imagining different houses discover it here — which is uncomfortable for an afternoon and catastrophic if left until construction.
The brief lives in the client's head and is revealed in fragments as the design progresses. Each fragment triggers a redesign. The scope creeps, the fee creeps, and both parties end up feeling the other has behaved unreasonably.
We write the brief down and we both sign it. That sounds bureaucratic, and it is the single best protection you have. A brief that lives in your head arrives in fragments, and every fragment triggers a redesign nobody budgeted for. Written down, it becomes the thing every later decision gets tested against — so when something genuinely new comes up, we can both see that it is new, rather than argue about whether it was always included.
Write it in four parts. What the project has to achieve, described as behaviour rather than as rooms — where you eat, where the kids land after school, what the house is like with six people in it. What is wrong with what you have, specifically. The real budget and the real timeframe, including any fixed date you are working towards. And the constraints you already know about: the site, the neighbours, the tree, the money, the fact that you cannot move out. Two or three pages is plenty.
Yes, and most of them work fine as prompt lists. Where they fall short is on the three things that actually shape a design: the order of priority, the sacrifice list and the true budget. A template will let you tick twelve must-haves. It will not make you rank them, and ranking is the part that does the work. Before you send anything, go back through your own list and mark the three you would defend to the end and the three you would trade first.
What you are keeping, and why. The rooms and details of the existing house you actually love, as distinct from the ones you are simply used to. Whether you will live through the build or move out, and how long you could stand it. Known defects and past work, approved or otherwise. And in Brisbane specifically, your position on the two big moves — raising the house, or extending at the rear — because they lead to very different projects and most people have a strong instinct about one of them.
Yes, with a sentence under each saying what you are responding to. An image on its own is ambiguous. I cannot tell whether you like the light, the joinery, the ceiling height or the fact that it is clearly a holiday. Twelve well-annotated images beat a board of two hundred. Send the ones you dislike as well, and say why. Negative examples are often sharper, because people are more articulate about what irritates them than about what pleases them.
Better to find that out over a kitchen table than in a design meeting. Write your briefs separately, without conferring, then read each other's. The overlaps are the project. The gaps are the conversation you were going to have eventually, at a worse moment, with an architect billing for the room. Then decide who has the final say on what. One of you should own the kitchen, one the bathrooms, and both of you the money. Ambiguity about who decides costs more than disagreement about what.
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.