'We did say we wanted a boot room'
At the spatial coordination stage, the clients look at the plans and ask where the boot room is. They mentioned it at the first meeting, standing in the kitchen, along with a dozen other things: a desk nook for home working, a view of the garden from the sink, a bath in the main bathroom, no open shelving. The project architect checks their notes. The boot room is not there. It was said, but it never made it into the written brief.
Now the plan needs reworking at a stage where changes cost time, and the clients feel they were not listened to.
Why briefs leak
Clients do not express their brief in one go. It comes out over site visits, phone calls, emails with Pinterest links and conversations at the kitchen table. The architect takes notes in a sketchbook or a notebook, writes a summary for the file, and the brief is then treated as done. As the design develops, clients change their minds, and the changes are agreed in meetings but not written back into the brief.
- Brief items are spread across notes, emails and memory.
- Clients mention priorities casually and assume they were recorded.
- Changes to the brief are agreed but not written down.
- Nobody checks the design against the brief at the end of each stage.
- Couples or families have different wishes, which are not always reconciled.
What a lost brief costs
Redesign at a late stage is expensive for the practice, especially on a fixed fee. Client trust drops when something they asked for is missing. And disputes about whether something was requested have nothing to refer to, because the brief was never a clear document the client saw and agreed.
A brief the client writes and the team maintains
- Before the first meeting, the client completes an online brief questionnaire: household, how they live, each room they want and what it is for, must-haves and nice-to-haves, dislikes, materials they like, and images they collect.
- Where there is more than one client, each can answer separately, and differences are shown for discussion rather than hidden.
- The architect reviews the answers before the meeting, so the meeting starts from the client's own words and fills in the gaps.
- The agreed brief is held as a list of items, each with a priority and a status.
- Changes agreed in meetings are recorded against the relevant item with a date, and the client can see the current brief at any time.
- At the end of each stage, the design team marks how each brief item has been addressed, and anything not addressed is raised with the client before sign-off.
- Notes from calls or emails can be turned into suggested brief changes by a language model, for the architect to accept or reject.
The brief at the end of a stage
| Brief item | Priority | Status at stage end |
|---|---|---|
| Boot room off side entrance | Must have | In the plan |
| Bath in main bathroom | Must have | In the plan |
| Desk nook for home working | Nice to have | Discussed, deferred by client |
| No open shelving | Dislike | Noted for technical design |
The rows are an illustration of the format, not a real brief.
Design reviews against what was asked
The design team works from one current brief rather than from memory. Clients see that what they said has been written down, which builds trust from the first meeting. Stage sign-offs include a check against the brief, so gaps are found when they are cheap to fix. And if there is a disagreement later, there is a dated record of what was asked for and what was agreed.
Is your brief a page of notes?
- The brief is written up once after the first meeting.
- Clients have asked where something is that they mentioned early on.
- Brief changes are agreed in meetings but not recorded.
- You do not check the design against the brief at stage end.