Part 1 - Advice For a New Project: Work With Your Feet On the Ground and Head in the Clouds!

Do You Want To Transform the Way You Live?

Spending time with friends and family over the festive period gives us all time to reflect on our living spaces, and aspirations for the New Year. At the beginning of the year, lots of people might have a goal to begin a new project for that warm, sustainable, healthy home that you've always wanted. And now you're wondering where to begin. This blog series aims to help you answer some of those burning questions; where do I start, how much will it cost, how long will it take, who do you need to be involved etc?

Think carefully about what it is you want to achieve, and why you are doing it. You might need more space (an extension), better space (a remodel), a lower energy home (a retrofit), a new home, or a combination of all of the above. A brief can be as long or as short as you like; as descriptive, or visionary as you wish!

Clients often present their brief to us as a mixture of writing and images to describe the different spaces they require, materials they are interested in, features they would like to incorporate, and scenarios (extended family visiting, entertaining guests etc) that they want to cater for.

A great brief for us is to understand how you want the space to make you feel, rather than precisely what it might look like. We can then bring our design skills and experience to explore that with you in an interactive and co-design process to tease out a range of solutions, refining as we go, ideally to meet and exceed your brief and expectations. In all cases, we will seek first to understand you, and then to be understood.

We have developed a really useful online briefing questionnaire form (below) with lots of prompts and ideas to start thinking about all the most important aspects of your brief. If you want to try this, and take the first step in defining what it is you want to do, then please follow this link and give it a go! Watch out for the next couple of blog posts, which will provide assistance with budgeting and time planning for your dream house building project!