Most people arrive at their first design meeting with a Pinterest board and a rough idea of what they hate about the house. That is a start. It is not a brief.
The difference matters more than it sounds. A vague brief does not produce a vague design. It produces a confident design of the wrong house, which you then spend three rounds of revisions dragging back toward what you actually wanted. Every one of those rounds costs time, and past a point, money.
A good brief is not long. Two or three pages is plenty. It just has to answer questions your designer would otherwise have to guess at.
Here is what to put in it.
Start with how you live, not what you want built
The instinct is to lead with the solution. Knock out the wall. Add a second storey. Put the kitchen at the back.
Resist that for a page.
Write down how the house is failing you instead. Everyone piles up at the front door and there is nowhere to put anything. The kitchen has one bench and two people who cook. Nobody uses the formal lounge. The laundry is a corridor. You cannot hear the kids from where you work.
A designer who understands the problem can often solve it more cheaply than the solution you had in mind. Plenty of second storeys get proposed to fix a storage problem that a reworked ground floor would have solved for a fifth of the cost.
Lead with the problem. Let them find the answer.
Be specific about the people
How many of you. How old. Who is likely to move in or out in the next ten years. Whether a parent might come and stay long term. Whether anyone works from home, and whether that means a laptop at the table or actual client calls that need a door.
Mobility matters too, and people underplay it. If you plan to be in the house in twenty years, say so. A wider hallway and a level entry cost almost nothing at design stage and a fortune to retrofit.
Say what stays
This is the section most briefs skip, and it saves the most money.
List what you do not want touched. The kitchen you renovated four years ago. The bathroom that works fine. The verandah. The floorboards. The tree.
Designers cannot tell which parts of the house you are attached to. Left to guess, they will design the best whole-house outcome, which may quietly demolish the one room you liked.
Give a real budget number
People hate this part. They worry that naming a figure means the design will magically cost exactly that figure.
Name it anyway. A designer working without a budget is designing blind, and the result is either a scheme you cannot afford or one that spends less than you were willing to spend on the thing you cared about.
Give a range if you must. Say what is fixed and what is stretchable. Say whether the number includes fees, permits and landscaping, because a build cost and a project cost are very different animals.
Rank your priorities honestly
Write down the three things you would protect if the budget got cut by a quarter. Then write down what you would drop first.
This is genuinely useful and almost nobody does it. When the quotes come back higher than hoped, and they often do, having already decided that the north-facing living area matters more than the ensuite means you make that call calmly rather than under pressure at the worst moment.
Include the constraints you already know about
The easement down the side. The neighbour’s window. The heritage overlay. The fact that a truck cannot get past the power pole. The slope you never think about because you have walked it a thousand times.
You will not know all of them. Your designer will find the rest. But the ones you do know save a site visit’s worth of discovery.
Set the timeline, including the immovable parts
If the lease on your rental ends in March, that is a design input, not a scheduling detail. If someone is having a baby in August, say so. If you want to be in before Christmas, work backwards and see whether the permit timeline even allows it.
Melbourne council assessment periods vary. Building permits, planning permits and any referrals all take time that is not in your control. A brief that names the hard date lets your designer tell you early whether it is realistic, instead of six months in.
Bring images, but explain them
A reference photo is useful. A reference photo with one line about what you like in it is far more useful.
“I like this” tells your designer nothing. “I like that the bench runs all the way to the window and there are no overhead cupboards” tells them everything.
Include images of things you dislike too. Those often clarify faster than the aspirational ones.
Then check that the person reading it is the right person
A good brief only works if the designer is a fit for the project. Before you hand it over, it is worth running through the questions to ask before hiring an interior drafting service so you know how they handle revisions, what software they use, how they charge and whether they stay involved through the approval stage.
The brief tells them what you need. Those questions tell you whether they can deliver it.
What a good brief actually buys you
Fewer revisions, mostly. That is the boring answer and it is the true one.
It also buys you a design conversation that starts at the interesting part. Instead of spending the first two meetings establishing that you have three kids and hate the laundry, you spend them talking about how light moves through the site and whether the extension should step down with the slope.
And it buys you a document to come back to. Six months later, when someone suggests a change that sounds appealing, you can check it against what you wrote when you were thinking clearly rather than when you were tired of the process.
Write it before the first meeting. Rewrite it once after, when the designer has asked you the things you had not thought about.
Then hold onto it. It is the only part of the project that is entirely yours.