What makes a good brief?

[puntloos]

What is the best type and amount of detail brief to provide the architect?

 

[edit: To be clear, in this context I am talking about the information you would like to have in your architect's head the moment they put pen to paper]

 

We've been going quite far with detail in our brief preparation - for example have a spreadsheet with 128 requirement lines of (roughly) the form: "The X room should have Y so that we can Z" - e.g. "The kitchen should have a separation so that during dinner we don't have to see the mess".

 

Is that even useful? Should we instead (or additionally) create lists of use cases? "When friends visit we will take them to the kitchen to have a glass of wine and perhaps help with cooking, dinner is in the dining area, then we move to the livingroom for some drinks and watching a movie"..?

 

What about sending them an actual draft design? We've dabbled in a 3D program so we actually  have a house design that "kinda, sorta" works for us, even though it's designed by an absolute amateur of course.

 

We're tempted by both directions - either dump all the info on them, or literally letting their imagination roam free as much as possible before constraining them..

 

Would love to see some of your briefs, and the resultant design! - as well as other thoughts..

Already found this forum post: Writing a Brief for the Architect - but only 2 there..

 

When we were reaching out to Architects our email contained the following description:

• X, Y and 1.5yo son Z. 
• Property purchased: <location with maps link>
• Goal: Family home for ourselves for the next 15 years
• Plot size: 27m x 15m
• Minimum about 185m2 (2000sqft) floorspace, happy to discuss cost vs benefits on making it larger.
• Min 3, max 5 bedrooms.
• Large rooms, rather than many rooms
• Large open plan living area with serious integrated home cinema
• High ceilings, ideally 2m75, especially downstairs. Upstairs 2m45 could suffice.
• No real plans for a loft, but perhaps worth doing for resale or add quirkiness to 2nd floor rooms.
• Good standard throughout. We don't care about 'brand' but do care about quality
• Elegance - not just an average 'box' but attention to lighting/atmosphere/details
• Budget wise, 185m2*ruleofthumb gives us xyabcz GBP. We have buffer allocated to cover unforeseen issues.

 

Edited September 2, 2019 by puntloos

[Ferdinand]

All those have a place. If you think they do. Some may be best to help you reflect then summarise. You need something you can send to an A before a meeting, that they can understand your needs from immediately, and that you can then usefully discuss in your 45 minutes with them.

 

It needs to reflect *you*, but the A needs a 3 minute brief, as well as some detail. This technique may help with working out / communicating your essentials.

 

1 - Boil it down to 1 page, of which the first 30 word para is an elevator summary.

2 - Give it to a competent friend / acquaintance for 5 minutes, on their own, with whom you have not previously talked in any detail. Work acquaintance would be ideal. Someone who has an activity or job which involves dealing with different things. 

3 - Take it back.

4 - Ask them to give you a summary of your key requirements in 60 seconds in their own words. Cut them off at 60.

5 - If ithey can do so accurately, bingo. If not, your doc is not yet sharp enough. Rinse and repeat with somebody else.

6 - Use that as either the entirety, or with a 1-2 page supporting appendix.

 

Once the A has got to grips with your essentials (and you need that to make sure that your details are hung on a balanced core requirements spec), then the A can ask you about your more general ideas and you can do your Blue Peter act..

At first you need to present the architect with a balanced-overall thing, otherwise it may skew the view around the sub-bits of the overall that you already know about.

 

Do not forget your budget requirements, and potential flexibililty (or not). And do not forget to have some cash in your back pocket that you keep completely secret from everyone.

 

Clearly there is more than this to choosing an A, but a clear understanding is a good place to start.

 

Ferdinand

 

Edited August 30, 2019 by Ferdinand

[Ferdinand]

Another way to get away from overthinking / overimagining, is to get some data by keeping a lifestyle diary and "area of house use" diary for a week or two.

 

Sarah Beeny has a delightful technique where she identifies unnecessary .underused areas of house by fitting people with a tracker and building up a breadcrumb trail / heat map.Room use diary would be similar.

 

 

Edited August 30, 2019 by Ferdinand

[Onoff]

Pure cotton I find or silk...

[Ferdinand]

Noooo ....  going off topic.

Edited August 30, 2019 by Ferdinand

[Jeremy Harris]

I boiled our brief down to one paragraph and 8 key bullet points that had to be complied with.  Anything over a single page is probably too long, IMHO.

[the_r_sole]

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Edited September 26, 2019 by the_r_sole

[Ferdinand]

3 minutes ago, the_r_sole said:

Coming from a different point of view here... I think it's more important to have a verbal discussion with your architect and see how they interpret you. The whole process is about communication so giving a written brief up front limits the amount of discussion and could hamper their understanding of what you want.

With a new client we would have a bit of an exercise using face to face meetings, questionnaires and image boards to try and get to the bottom of what they want out of the design.

Don't hand over a floor plan, if you have seen something that works for you, show images that help understand how you want the spaces to work and join together - imagining different scenarios is a really useful exercise.

Boil it down to a few bullet points that you communicate verbally, you need to find out how good they are at listening - there's little point in employing a designer with experience and who's work you like, then handing them a floor plan or accommodation schedule.

 

The brief will also change and develop through all the stages of the project

 

Interesting complementary points.

 

My argument was for a brief brief plus some more inchaote ideas as an anchor for such a follow-up conversation, with some work in advance so that the client has formed their strategic idea, but not the tactical design ideas.

 

As a slight bulwark to going-offtrack-itis.

Edited August 30, 2019 by Ferdinand

[Jeremy Harris]

Out of interest, how have others gone about selecting an architect?

 

I opted to use an outline brief, together with a site plan, topo plan and a short initial meeting, to try and get a feel as to how each might approach a design that met our needs.  I found it a very disheartening process, TBH, as every one of the four practices I went to weren't interested in our most critical requirement, which was that the house should meet or exceed PHI Passivhaus energy use requirements.  This created a lot of extra work for me, as I ended up pretty much having to design the house myself, which was something that was well outside my comfort zone.

[the_r_sole]

.

 

Edited September 26, 2019 by the_r_sole

[Ferdinand]

23 minutes ago, the_r_sole said:

 

Yeah, I don't disagree, it's just that I think you should maybe speak to the architect first and build some rapport, being able to work with someone for a year+ and speak about how you live means you want to get the right person, who can understand how you communicate rather than getting straight into the nuts and bolts of everything straight away.

Although if you've got strong ideas, don't be afraid to talk about them - over the years I've come to realise that when people write a brief, they don't necessarily say what they think they are saying, so it's good to try and establish early whether you can build a real understanding.

 

(I also realise that this sounds like airy fairy stuff which architects are accused of all the time, but if i can spend a few hours talking to you over a coffee and get honest, open answers, I'll design you a much better house!)

 

 

Probably our different viewpoints.

 

I see it as a way of compensating for, and building on, the possible inexperience of the client.

 

Edited August 30, 2019 by Ferdinand

[dpmiller]

We did things completely differently. We trawled online "book plan" services (there are at least three big ones over here), found a design that was attractive to us and then via phone and email discussed changes to the design to suit our needs. Ended up being a full redraw, and our guy was absolutely superb.

[Gone West]

7 hours ago, JSHarris said:

Out of interest, how have others gone about selecting an architect?

We designed our own house back in 2009. At the time there was a scheme called  'Architect in the House' where a participating architect would visit you at your home to go through your plans in return for a donation for Shelter. It worked well for us, picking his brains to improve our plans.

[Vijay]

Doesn't matter what you tell an architect, they'll design a house they think you should have lol

[vivienz]

On 30/08/2019 at 18:19, Vijay said:

Doesn't matter what you tell an architect, they'll design a house they think you should have lol

 

That was my experience, in fact. The ATs I spoke to listened far more carefully to our desires for the build whereas the architects all told us what we should have. I explained that the rural site and potential for developing the gardens was a project my hubby had wanted to undertake for years; one of the architects said that he should also be allowed to design the garden, even though he wasn't a gardener and didn't have a clue what any of the trees or plants were called but knew what they should look like!

Edited September 2, 2019 by vivienz
Sp.

[puntloos]

We took quite a while to select an architect. Our approach:

 

A/ Get a good selection

1/ Recommendations, of course. Local facebook group, as well as asking some local builders who they worked with.

2/ Recommendations from RIBA - they have the find an architect service

but #3 gave us the best results:
3/ Image Search Google for "riba architect oxfordshire" - and then pick images you like

 

B/ Actual vetting

1/ Check their website, check houses they list etc etc

2/ Mail them, ask for rough pricing for your idea ("250m2 detached 2-story new build") 

3/ Select a top 3, call them. They probably offer to come over. 

 

C/ Ask proper questions with them onsite.

(can put our question list in another discussion if you want - this is getting too much off topic

 

[edit: Quick note though: maybe I am misunderstanding but we provided architects with a "10 point, single pager brief" before/during stage C. This is not what I call a brief. Instead, to me a brief is the "human readable" description that the architect works off once she actually puts pen to paper. Effectively, to me, 

anything that's not in the brief will likely not make it into the house. (unless it's some small flourish of course)]

Edited September 2, 2019 by puntloos

[puntloos]

Going back on topic - we went a different way and produced a ton of detail on our brief. (both me and my wife are engineers...)

But, of course, you need to 'dose it out' rather than overwhelm the Architect, although each and every architect we asked explicitly said they wanted as much detail as we could generate (it was one of our architect selection questions - 'what would you like to see from us regarding the brief')

 

FWIW: we just selected our architect this weekend. We're meeting her this Wednesday to kick off ?

 

We created:
1/ A full house design in 3D.

• While just playing around It was really eye-opening to see how a bunch of compromises just fall into place once you have a to-scale canvas of your plot, with locations of other houses, roads etc. "Oh, you want a 10x6 livingroom? I guess you don't want a garage then..."
• We do not intend to show, and limit the architect's thoughts with it until she produced a reasonable draft

2/ A cinemaroom design. Just the ideal locations of speakers, projectors etc

3/ Our "requirements" spreadsheet. This is the big one. 6 tabs:

• Rooms - Our descriptions for what we'd like to see in various rooms, including sizes, functionalities. 'houzz' column with houzz ideabook links
• Lifestyle - Various habits and situations described, "dinner party for 6 people", "bedtime routine"
• Ideas - Loose ideas around the house. A little outdated at this point
• Storage - mostly our current storage situation, extrapolated to 'ideal'
• Requirements - Individual items, classified by various criteria, rooms etc
• Brands - if we have specific ideas for devices/products we have seen and like, we've already jotted them down. Awnings by xyz

4/ The "one pager" brief, that indeed contains the high level idea of the house.

 

Edited September 2, 2019 by puntloos

[puntloos]

On 30/08/2019 at 07:13, Ferdinand said:

Another way to get away from overthinking / overimagining, is to get some data by keeping a lifestyle diary and "area of house use" diary for a week or two.

 

Sarah Beeny has a delightful technique where she identifies unnecessary .underused areas of house by fitting people with a tracker and building up a breadcrumb trail / heat map.Room use diary would be similar.

 

Ha, that's a great idea. (and I didn't know location trackers could have that level of detail inside..)

 

To be fair though I have a pretty good idea what this would give in my current house. And this was reflected in our brief as well, we want a low *number* of rooms, but of large size.

 

 

[Ferdinand]

Great to see that you got there.

 

We have a thread for architectural briefs, but it only has a couple on it.

 

Is there a chance you could add some of your stuff here, to be an example for future readers?

 

> Writing a Brief for the Architect 

 

?

Edited September 2, 2019 by Ferdinand

[puntloos]

4 minutes ago, Ferdinand said:

Great to see that you got there.

 

We have a thread for architectural briefs, but it only has a couple on it.

 

Is there a chance you could add some of your stuff here, to be an example for future readers?

 

> Writing a Brief for the Architect 

 

?

 

Yes, I fully intend to very shortly, would love our stuff to be critiqued too. 

 

Am I correct on my earlier point though, that the brief is the 'principles that the architect needs to start drawing', not the presales stuff?

 

Once they are actually designing your house, would it not be helpful to have as much detail as you can muster, as long as you try to avoid pinning them down on specific "shape and layout" things?

 

 

[Ferdinand]

Just now, puntloos said:

 

Yes, I fully intend to very shortly, would love our stuff to be critiqued too. 

 

Am I correct on my earlier point though, that the brief is the 'principles that the architect needs to start drawing', not the presales stuff?

 

Once they are actually designing your house, would it not be helpful to have as much detail as you can muster, as long as you try to avoid pinning them down on specific "shape and layout" things?

 

 

 

I do not think there is a definition for a "brief". It is whatever lets the architect evaluate you and vice-versa. And if it doesn't work in your relationship and process you recast it.

 

Probably the most important thing is to have actually stopped to consider your needs at all.

 

I like the "one line - one sentence - one page" outline as it lets the thinking develop.

[puntloos]

Just now, Ferdinand said:

 

I do not think there is a definition for a "brief". It is whatever lets the architect evaluate you and vice-versa. And if it doesn't work in your relationship and process you recast it.

 

OK so you do think of this as part of the 'selecting architect' process, not of the 'when you have hired them, client-side input of the house design'

 

Just now, Ferdinand said:

Probably the most important thing is to have actually stopped to consider your needs at all.

 

Oh we are very needy.

 

Just now, Ferdinand said:

I like the "one line - one sentence - one page" outline as it lets the thinking develop.

 

Agreed, quite nice. And maybe even 'one word'. For us it would possibly be 'cosy'. 

 

Let me dump my brief in the original post.

 

[Ferdinand]

3 minutes ago, puntloos said:

OK so you do think of this as part of the 'selecting architect' process, not of the 'when you have hired them, client-side input of the house design'

 

Broader than that.

 

I see it as part of the process of you getting the skills to know your own needs, and explore them, which will mean you can be an active client and use your architect well. And to be the basic output documentation of that whole process. And then a check for your reference at each stage over 2-4 years so you know how you got where you are.

 

So really, as the foundational document throughout.

F

Edited September 2, 2019 by Ferdinand

[the_r_sole]

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Edited September 26, 2019 by the_r_sole

[puntloos]

10 minutes ago, the_r_sole said:

some interesting points from @Ferdinand and @puntloos here, I have never had a client who has put that much time and thought into a brief!

Therefore we usually spend a bit of time trying to coax the details out! The more information you can give to an architect the better, but I draw the line at someone giving me a floor plan, what tends to happen then is that a lot of people close their mind to possibilities and lose all the value of employing someone with design skills. No matter what you produce as an initial brief, you want to sit down with who you are working with to make sure they can understand what you are saying...

 

Ha, yes exactly, we want the architect to do exactly what they are good at:

- Imagining an actual living house that hits the right wishes, compromises, beauty and balances for the client

- Getting to the things us newbies might not realise

- Work within the seen and unseen limits

 

I am not good and/or lack the experience of this creative stuff, and I lack the design skills, but I do know how I can nail down requirements, needs, stories, reasons why, etc. (kinda my dayjob)

 

Our documents, are specific on what we want to do and why, but not on how it should look