How to Write a Brief for Your Designer

Why the brief matters more than the mood board

Mood boards describe an outcome. Briefs describe constraints, and constraints are what a designer actually works with. We have received forty-image Pinterest boards that told us less than one sentence about how a family eats dinner. The brief is where you say that nobody in the house sits on the floor, that the eight-year-old practises piano, that one of you works night shifts and sleeps in the afternoon, and that your mother visits for six weeks each winter. Every one of those facts changes a drawing.

Section one: the household

Start with facts that cannot be argued with. This section should take twenty minutes and it prevents the majority of layout revisions.

• Who lives here permanently, and their ages. Who visits, how often, and for how long.
• How many people cook at once, and how often. Do you cook non-vegetarian food, and is there a separate requirement for it?
• Where do you eat — dining table, kitchen counter, in front of the television? Be honest rather than aspirational.
• Who works from home, how many hours a day, and do they need to be on video calls?
• Pets, and where they sleep, eat and shed.
• Any mobility, allergy or sensory considerations that affect materials, heights or lighting.
• Religious or ritual requirements — a pooja space, its orientation and what it must hold.

Briefing

Design and build under one accountable roof

Section two: the storage inventory

This is the part almost nobody does and the part that pays for itself. Walk through your current home and count. Not estimate — count. The output is a table your designer can design against, and it converts a vague desire for 'lots of storage' into a specific number of cubic feet.

Section three: money and time

Withholding the budget is the most common and most self-defeating brief error. A designer who does not know the ceiling designs to a plausible mid-point, which is either above what you will spend — producing a design you have to strip back, losing its coherence — or below what you would have spent, producing something less than you wanted. State the number.

1. The ceiling, ex-GST. The total you will not exceed, before tax and before contingency.
2. Whether contingency is inside or outside it. It should be outside, at 10%.
3. What is in scope. Loose furniture, curtains, appliances, art — say which of these your number includes.
4. The move-in date, and how firm it is. A hard date because a rental lease expires is different from a preferred date.
5. Your payment capacity by month, if the milestones matter to your cash flow. Good studios will structure around it if they know early.
6. Whether you will live in the flat during the work. This changes the sequence, the cost and the programme substantially.

Section four: taste, stated usefully

Now the images. The rule is one caption per image, and the caption should name what you like — not 'love this' but 'the wood tone, not the layout' or 'the way the light sits behind the headboard'. Ten captioned images beat sixty uncaptioned ones. Include two or three images of things you actively dislike; negative preferences are more precise than positive ones and designers rely on them heavily.

Show me how you actually live, not how you would like to be photographed living. The second one we can add later.

Greenbox principal designer

What to send, and when

1. Write it before you meet anyoneThe act of writing it will change what you ask for, and you want that to happen before you are being sold to.
2. Send the same brief to all three studiosComparable briefs produce comparable proposals. Different briefs produce three incomparable documents and a difficult decision.
3. Attach the floor plan and photographsEvery room, all four walls, plus the electrical board and the shaft side of the kitchen and bathrooms.
4. Include the storage inventory as a tableDesigners read tables. A paragraph about needing storage will be skimmed.
5. Update it once after the first meetingGood designers will ask questions that change your brief. Revise it and reissue, so everyone is working from the same version.

Selected work by Greenbox Design Studio. Tap any image to enlarge.