A house begins not with a foundation and not even with the first sketch. It begins with a conversation about how you are going to live in it. That conversation, put down on paper, is the technical brief for designing a private house — the document with which we begin work on every project.
Below is how to approach the brief so that the result is your house, not an average box with the right floor area. And once you have thought through the main things, you will assemble it all in the constructor further down this page: it will calculate the areas for you.
In short: so that you and the architect are talking about the same house.
The wishes in a client's head are almost always vague — "I want it light, spacious and with room for guests". The brief translates this from the language of feelings into the language of tasks that can be solved. Until "spacious" has turned into specific rooms, areas and connections between them, there is nothing to design.
The second reason we ask the client to invest in the brief is a point of support. Designing a house takes weeks, hundreds of decisions are made, and memory lets both sides down. The brief records the agreements. If a dispute comes up along the way — "I asked for a study, not a second walk-in closet" — we look at the brief together, rather than working out who meant what three weeks ago.
And the third thing we honestly warn about right away. The brief disciplines not only the architect but the client too. Changing the set of rooms after the concept has been agreed is expensive: it drags along a recalculation of the layouts, the elevations and, later, the structure. A well-thought-out brief spares you these swings. A few evenings now means saved months and money later.
Here runs the main watershed. You will write the list of rooms without us: bedrooms, kitchen, living room, bathrooms — the set is roughly the same for everyone. Yet everyone's houses turn out different, because people live in them differently.
The list of rooms answers the question "what". The scenario of living answers the question "how it is lived in" — and it is this that turns a set of rooms into a home. Two families of the same make-up will give us two completely different houses if in one everyone gathers in the kitchen in the evening, while the other dines separately and lives on their own floors.
That is why we ask the client not to list rooms but to describe a few of their ordinary days. Out loud, hour by hour, with everyday details. Below is how to do this and what grows out of each account.
Talk through the family's weekday from getting up to lights out. Who gets up and when. How many people get ready at the same time in the morning — and whether you fight over the only bathroom. Who works from home and who needs quiet behind a closed door for it. Where you drop your keys, coat and bags from the car.
An example from practice. A client tells us: "In the morning my wife leaves first, I get two children ready for school, in the evening I bring the week's groceries — my hands are full, I haul it all from the garage through half the house".
Design solution: a second bathroom next to the children's rooms, so that the morning does not turn into a queue. A short route "garage → storage → kitchen" without passing through the living room. A place for a home study with a door, rather than "a desk in the corner of the bedroom".
Weekdays are logistics; days off are about how the family rests together and apart. Where you actually spend a Saturday morning. Whether you all gather in one room or scatter. Who cooks and whether they like company or quiet while doing it. What happens in the yard.
An example. "At the weekend my wife cooks for a long time and likes it when everyone is around, the children play right there, and I grill something outside".
Design solution: a kitchen-living room as a single space, not an isolated kitchen. A visual link with the area where the children play — so you can cook and keep an eye out at the same time. An exit from the kitchen straight to the barbecue area, not through the living room and three doors.
Guests are the most underestimated point. It is also the one that most often inflates the house with extra square metres. Ask yourself honestly: how do you actually receive guests. Is it a noisy crowd of twenty once a month — or two friends in the kitchen on Fridays. Do guests stay the night — and how often.
An example. "Big gatherings are a couple of times a year, at New Year. Usually two or three close people come over, and we sit in the kitchen until late".
Design solution: do not inflate the formal living room and dining room for rare gatherings — a transformable space is enough for those. A guest bedroom for a couple of overnight stays a year is more honestly replaced with a study and a sofa bed than keeping a room that stands empty three hundred days. The square metres go where you live every day.
A house is built for the long term, and it is lived in not only by today's family. Talk through how it will change. Small children will become teenagers who need autonomy and, perhaps, a separate entrance. The older ones will one day leave — and some rooms will empty. Elderly parents who find stairs hard may move in. Is another child planned.
An example. "The children are five and seven now. My parents are getting on, and I do not rule out that in a few years they will move in with us".
Design solution: one bedroom with a bathroom on the ground floor without stairs — now a guest room or study, later a room for the parents. Children's rooms that are easy to replan for teenagers. A built-in possibility, rather than a blank wall where a separate entrance may be needed in ten years.
Once the scenario is talked through, the set of rooms comes together almost by itself — no longer as a wishlist of "what else to squeeze in", but as a consequence of how you live. This is the right order: first the scenario, then the rooms, not the other way round.
And here what matters is not the presence of rooms but the connections between them. "A 15 m² kitchen" says nothing. "A kitchen from which you can see the children and the entrance to the yard" is already a design solution. What borders what, what is isolated from what, where a short route is needed and where quiet is: almost all the expensive alterations on site are born not from a forgotten room but from unconsidered connections between them.
Last — priorities. Mark what is critical and what is "nice to have if it fits the budget". This honestly sets the accents and helps a great deal when the area or the estimate hits the ceiling: we know exactly what can be sacrificed and what must not be touched.
A house is designed not in a vacuum but on a specific piece of land. Before the brief — or better together with it — it is worth gathering the input data on the plot.
A cadastral plan, a topographic survey, geological surveys and the urban-planning plan of the land plot will come in useful. Some of it can be provided later, but the earlier, the fewer surprises. Separately — what determines the siting of the house: the points of the compass and insolation (where the morning sun is, where you want the evening sun), the terrain, the view, where the wind comes from and where the neighbours' windows look.
It is from this that a sound siting of the house on the plot is born — and with it, where your windows and terrace will face. A living room turned to the north because of poor siting is a mistake that cannot be fixed after the build.
The concept design is the first stage. It answers the main question: what will my house be like? At this stage the layouts, the siting on the plot, the appearance, the number of floors and the overall volume are determined. The structure and engineering are not included here in detail — they will appear later, building on the approved concept.
As a rule, a concept design includes an explanatory note, a site plan with the siting of the house, floor plans with a schedule of rooms, sections, elevations, a roof plan and 3D visualisation. We record the exact scope and content requirements in the brief and the contract — here one can rely on GOST 2.119-2013 as a reference for the stage.
A subtlety worth knowing: the degree of detail of the concept itself is also set in the brief. How many layout options you want to see, whether visualisation is needed, how detailed the explanatory note should be — this is part of the agreements, not something that "will work out somehow".
So that you sidestep the typical pitfalls, here is what we see most often:
What is a technical brief for designing a house?
A document where you formulate how you want your house to be: how it is lived in, what rooms it consists of, how it stands on the plot, in what style and budget. The brief translates wishes into the language of tasks and becomes the basis for the architect's work.
Where to start when writing a brief for designing a private house?
Not with the list of rooms, but with the scenario of living: a weekday, a day off, receiving guests, the family's horizon for 10–15 years. From the scenario grow the set, connections and priorities of the rooms. In parallel, gather the input data on the plot.
How does the brief for a concept design differ from a full brief?
It records the concept — layouts, siting, appearance, the set of rooms — and sets the depth of elaboration of the concept. The structure and engineering are not included in detail; they appear at the following stages.
What does a house concept design include?
Usually — an explanatory note, a site plan with the siting, floor plans with a schedule, sections, elevations, a roof plan and 3D visualisation. The exact scope is determined by the brief and the contract.
Is it necessary to write a brief if you just want to start quickly?
Formally, the law does not require it. But without a brief, designing turns into a series of reworks, and the most expensive corrections surface on site. A few evenings now save months later.
You have thought through how you will live — now let us assemble it into a structure. The constructor below will take you through the set of rooms and will itself calculate the areas, coefficients and building footprint. From you — the scenario and the decisions; the square metres we will take on ourselves.
This is not a quick questionnaire but a real design brief — set aside 15–20 minutes of calm, thoughtful work for it. Assemble the make-up of the house with checkboxes, change the areas if you wish — everything is calculated automatically. The more carefully you describe your future house now, the more precise and closer to your picture the first concept will be.
Corridors and halls are taken as a percentage of the floor area; the staircase is added by itself when there are several levels.
Actual — the real area of all rooms as they are: how much space you get.
Weighted — the same area, but open and unheated spaces are counted with a reducing coefficient (an open terrace, a carport — ×0.5): a square metre of a warm room and of an open terrace "weigh" differently. The weighted area is put into the estimate and documents; the actual is about the real volume of the house.
The finished document is already assembled. Press "Show brief" to view it on screen, and "Request the technical brief" to send it to yourself by email. A ready-made email will open in your mail — just press "Send", and the brief will come to you in reply within a couple of minutes.