What a Brief Should Contain

Most clients arrive with a room list and a budget. Neither is a brief. A room list is an answer to a question nobody has asked yet, and a budget with no scope attached to it is a number waiting to be wrong.

We spend the first stage of every project taking the brief apart and handing it back changed. That is not us overruling anybody — it is usually the site doing it. But the projects that go well are the ones where the client arrived with some of this already thought through.

A brief is a set of constraints, not a wish list

The useful version answers three questions.

Who is going to use this, and how does that change over time? A house for a family of four in 2026 is a house for two people in 2041. On the Kothrud House the clients told us at the first meeting that one set of parents would move in within five years and another might. That one sentence produced the split-level section and the separable ground floor. If they had told us in month nine, it would have produced a redesign.

What must be true for this to be a success? Not "beautiful". Something you could test. The ground floor works without stairs. The whole thing is buildable in two phases. The west rooms are usable in May. Three testable statements are worth more than three pages of adjectives.

What are you willing to give up? Every project trades something away. The courtyard at House of Three Walls cost seven per cent of the floor area, and the clients agreed to that before we drew it. Deciding which thing you will sacrifice, in advance, is far cheaper than discovering it during construction documentation.

The number nobody wants to say first

Budget.

Clients withhold it because they believe a stated figure immediately becomes a floor. In practice the opposite happens: without it, the first design is a guess, and the second one is a redesign you have paid for.

A range is enough. So is a ceiling. What matters is that it is real, and that it includes the things people routinely forget:

• consultant fees — structural, MEP, survey, soil
• statutory fees, scrutiny charges and development premiums
• furniture, fittings and anything loose
• a contingency that is not zero, because it will not be zero

If your number covers only construction, it is roughly 70 per cent of what the project will cost you. Better to know that in week one.

What we do with it

We take the brief into the site appraisal and see what survives contact. A plot open on one side cannot give every room a perimeter window. A plot with a nine-metre fall cannot have a single-level plan without a great deal of money going into the ground. A protected tree in the middle of a narrow site will cost you a garage.

None of that is bad news. It is the actual design problem, arriving early enough to be useful — and a brief that has already absorbed it is the difference between a project that takes eighteen months and one that takes thirty.