What a room brief is and why it comes before sketches
A room brief is a written list of spaces with approximate areas, the relationships between them and your priorities, prepared before the architect starts drawing. Without it the first sketch rests on guesswork, and each revision fixes misunderstandings rather than improving the design. With it, a layout that fits your life arrives sooner and costs less.
The brief is not a wish list from a magazine. It describes how your family lives today and how it will live in five or ten years. Four bedrooms for one family and four bedrooms for another can mean two completely different houses.
Start with an ordinary day, not a list of rooms
Describe a weekday hour by hour. Who gets up first and must not wake the others. Where breakfast happens. Who works from home and whether they need quiet for calls. Where the children drop their bags and do their homework. Where laundry dries. Then describe a weekend: guests, barbecues, the pool, the children's friends staying over.
The brief almost writes itself from that. If two people work from home and both spend hours on the phone, one study is not enough, and a guest room doubling as a study stops working the day guests arrive. If you often entertain by the pool, the guest WC needs access from the garden, not only from the hall.
The schedule of rooms with areas
Next, draw up a table: room, what it is for, how many people use it, what furniture must fit, approximate area. It is better to derive the area from the furniture than the other way round. If the living room has to take a six-seat sofa and a piano, that sets the dimensions more precisely than 'living room, 40 m²'.
Do not forget the spaces that always come up last: a hall with storage for beach and sports gear, a laundry room, a pantry, a plant room for the boiler, heat pump, pool equipment and the solar panel inverter, a garage or carport, a place for the bins. Together they easily take a visible share of the floor area.
Add corridors, stairs and walls to the total. The built area of a house is always more than the sum of the rooms, and that is what the cost estimate is based on. Every extra square metre in the brief is multiplied by the price per metre of the finish level you choose.
How the rooms relate to each other
A list of areas does not describe a house. Mark which rooms must sit together: kitchen and terrace for eating outdoors, kitchen and pantry, garage and kitchen for unloading shopping, the main bedroom with its bathroom and dressing room, laundry and drying area. And which must be kept apart: bedrooms and a living room with a TV, study and children's room, plant room and bedrooms if the equipment is noisy.
Think about orientation separately: where you want morning sun and where evening shade is welcome. On the coast, in Castelldefels or the Maresme, a sea view may decide which room gets the best facade. That choice should be made deliberately, before the sketch.
Essential, desirable, future
Split everything into three columns. Essential: without it the house does not work for you. Desirable: nice to have, but you can let it go if it does not fit the plot or the budget. Future: what you will need later, such as a ground-floor bedroom for elderly parents, space for a lift, or a study in place of a child's room once the children leave.
Future needs often cost almost nothing if planned now: a bedroom with a bathroom on the ground floor, wide doorways, provision for a platform lift, spare electrical capacity for charging an electric car. Altering a finished house is expensive. And priorities let you trim the brief deliberately if, after the first estimate, the area or budget comes out higher than planned.
What to bring to the first meeting
A description of an ordinary weekday and a weekend, the table of rooms with furniture, the relationship diagram, the three columns of priorities, the plot details and photos of houses where you felt at home, with a note on what exactly you liked. That is enough for the team to test feasibility and estimate area and cost before the layout is approved.
Between 2022 and 2024 we built a detached house with a pool from start to finish, solar panels included, and we know how many decisions hinge on a clear brief at the outset. One person runs the project, in Spanish or Russian, with stage payments under the contract. Send us your plot and your brief, and we will reply within an hour.