The brief starts with you. Before plans, finishes or planning applications, it records what the project needs to change about the way you live.
Most people begin with a list of rooms. A larger kitchen. Another bedroom. A utility room. A home office. Those things may all be needed, but they do not yet explain the project. A useful brief goes further. It describes what is not working now, what an ordinary day looks like and what you hope will feel different when the work is finished.
It does not need to be polished before you speak to a designer. In fact, it should develop as you learn more about the house, the budget and what is possible. The important thing is that changes are deliberate and recorded. A brief can evolve without the project drifting.
Begin with the reason for doing the work
Before you write about rooms, write down why you are considering the project at all.
Why take on the cost and disruption rather than stay as you are or move? What should be easier afterwards? What would make the project feel worthwhile five or ten years from now?
Try describing an ordinary Tuesday rather than a special occasion. Perhaps everyone comes home at the same time and the hallway disappears under coats and bags. Perhaps you cook while the children work at the table, but the noise from the kitchen takes over the sitting room. Perhaps you have enough floor area, yet nowhere that feels private.
These details may sound less important than the number of bedrooms, but they are what help a designer make decisions. Later, when the budget or the building forces a choice between two things you want, the original reason for the project tells you which one matters more.
Describe life before you describe the solution
Write about what happens in the house and where it happens now.
Where do people gather without planning to? Which rooms are used every day and which are avoided? Where do bags, shoes, paperwork and laundry collect? Do you prefer cooking as part of family life or away from it? Who stays overnight, and how often? Where do you work, exercise, read or make a private phone call?
Look at the house honestly. A dining room that is only used twice a year may not need protecting as a formal dining room. A spare bedroom that has become an office may be doing two jobs badly. A sitting room with several doors may have enough space on paper but nowhere sensible to put the furniture.
This is why “we want an open-plan kitchen diner” is not quite a brief. It is one possible answer. “We want to talk while one of us cooks, but we do not want kitchen noise and mess to dominate the sitting room” leaves room for several better responses.
When you come to room sizes, use what you already know. Measure the rooms you live in now and describe what feels right or wrong about them. Most people cannot picture four metres by five metres, but they know that their current kitchen is wide enough until two cupboard doors are open at the same time.
Decide what matters most
Every project eventually meets a limit. It may be money, planning, structure, time or simply the amount of disruption you are willing to tolerate.
Put your requirements into three groups: things the project fails without, things you strongly want, and things that would be lovely if they fit. The wording matters less than the ranking.
Without that order, the first thing removed when a cost plan comes back high is often the easiest item to delete, not the least important one. A clear brief lets you reduce scope without losing the reason you started.
Record the constraints you already know about too. Include listed status, conservation areas, covenants, protected trees, shared access, rights of way, parking problems, overlooking and anything that came up in the survey or conveyancing. A constraint found early can shape a good design. The same constraint discovered halfway through can undo one.
There are a few personal constraints that are just as important and are often left out.
Say who will make decisions and how you will handle disagreement. Couples can have very different priorities, and a project can lose weeks while everyone waits for a choice nobody feels authorised to make.
Think about the next ten or twenty years. Children may arrive or leave. A parent may need to stay. Working from home may become permanent. You may want level access, a downstairs shower or space that can adapt later. These things are usually inexpensive to allow for at design stage and difficult to add once the work is complete.
List anything that must fit. A piano, inherited furniture, a particular dining table, artwork, sports equipment or a dog crate all have real dimensions. Rooms designed without those dimensions tend to work beautifully until the furniture returns.
Include the date you hope to finish and explain why it matters. A school term, a tenancy ending or a baby due is more useful information than a date on its own because it shows what part of the programme needs protecting.
It also helps to say how you feel about maintenance. Some people want surfaces that need almost no care. Others are happy to oil timber or accept a stone that changes with age. Neither preference is wrong, but your designer cannot infer it from an inspiration image.
Be honest about the budget
Many clients worry that sharing the budget gives the designer permission to spend all of it. Keeping it secret usually creates a bigger problem.
Without a figure, the design may develop into something you cannot afford. Months are then lost reducing it, often after everyone has become attached to the original scheme. The opposite can happen too. A designer may be unnecessarily cautious and you never see what could have been achieved.
Give the number you are comfortable spending and say what it includes. Does it cover construction only, or also professional fees, surveys, planning and building control charges, VAT, furniture, temporary accommodation and contingency? A £300,000 construction budget and a £300,000 total project budget are not the same instruction.
If you genuinely do not know what the work should cost, say so. Establishing a realistic budget can be the first piece of professional work. It is better to test the project early than to design against a hopeful figure and dismantle it later.
Use images carefully
Collecting reference images is useful, but the value is not in the size of the folder.
A small group of images you can explain is more helpful than hundreds saved because something caught your eye. For each one, write down what you respond to. It might be the softness of the light, the proportions, a sense of calm, the joinery detail or the way two materials meet. The explanation is often more useful than the image itself.
Be cautious with images that may be AI generated. They can still communicate mood, but they may show impossible spans, inconsistent light, furniture at the wrong scale or details that cannot be built. Treat them as atmosphere rather than proof that the exact room can be recreated.
Most importantly, do not let the images become a set of instructions to copy. Your house has its own light, structure, proportions and history. The aim is to understand what you like well enough to create something that belongs there.
A good brief states the problem clearly and leaves room for the answer to be tested. Include ideas you have already considered, but label them as ideas rather than fixed requirements. One of the reasons to appoint a designer is to be shown an option you had not thought of and to recognise that it answers the life you described better than the room you originally requested.
Start your brief
We have turned these questions into a practical workbook, with space for priorities, existing-room comparisons, constraints and reference images. It is the same kind of information we would ask you to bring to an early conversation, and it is useful whether or not you go on to work with Lapunne.