Designing your family home in Spain: write the brief before choosing the rooms

Asking for three bedrooms and a large living room leaves a designer with many unanswered questions. Does someone take work calls while another person cooks? Where do muddy shoes go? Is the spare room needed twice a year or every week? A useful house brief explains these details before they become expensive drawing revisions.

The brief is a working record of activities, priorities and constraints. It is not a technical design or a planning approval. Its value is that you and the architect can return to the same requirements when comparing options or deciding where to reduce expenditure.

Start with the household's overlapping routines

Describe an ordinary weekday and a day at home. Include who uses each space, when they use it and which other activity happens at the same time. “Two people leave for work together” gives a designer more to investigate than “we want a comfortable bathroom”. Give practical examples rather than a list of adjectives.

Distinguish regular needs from occasional ones. A rarely used dining space may accommodate another activity; a daily workspace might need dependable privacy. These are household decisions, not universal design rules. The aim is to describe the life your own house must support without turning every wish into another dedicated room.

Rank requirements before the budget forces a choice

Use three categories: essential, desirable and potentially deferred. Ask everyone living in the home to explain their choices. An essential requirement makes a necessary activity possible. A desirable feature improves the experience. A deferred item should be something that can reasonably be added later, with suitable provision if needed.

For example, accessible storage for cleaning equipment may solve a daily problem more effectively than extra entrance space. Delaying a decorative finish is also different from delaying a service route. Ask which future changes would require opening completed work or repeating labour, and include those consequences in the discussion.

Allocate space using a consistent area definition

Prepare a room schedule, but establish whether figures refer to usable internal area or built area. Partitions, service zones and circulation need space. Adding the areas you want inside rooms and comparing the result directly with a catalogue's built floor area can produce a misleading impression of what will fit.

Here is an illustrative allocation of 100 m² of usable space: 30 for shared living, 34 for bedrooms and work, 12 for bathrooms, 8 for storage and support, and 16 for circulation. The arithmetic totals 100; it is not a recommended design or a set of legal room sizes. Your architect still needs to test proportions, relationships and the resulting built area.

Where space is tight, consider activities that can share a place at different times. The tiny house guide offers useful everyday layout tests without assuming that everyone should live in a small home. Our 100 m² house budget guide discusses built area, so keep the two measures clearly distinguished.

Let the plot influence the programme

The same requirements can lead to different designs on sites with different orientation, gradients, access and planning conditions. Give your architect the available plot information and mark anything unverified. Fixing an external shape too early can conceal the constraints that should help organise the house.

Understand the difference between permitted floor area and plot coverage. A programme might fit within the total allowance but require a different arrangement to respect the footprint, height or boundary setbacks. A layout may also create additional site work, so assess the land and building budget together.

Describe privacy and outdoor use in practical terms. Identify the views you value, the spaces that need screening and where you expect to spend time at different hours. These are questions for the design process. A broad orientation label does not establish the comfort of a particular room throughout the year.

Include the parts that disappear in the presentation

Ask the team to locate equipment, access panels, service routes, waste storage and maintenance space. The house needs to operate as well as look appealing. If you are considering battery storage for solar panels, its location and requirements belong in the technical discussion even if the purchase decision comes later.

Describe storage through actual objects. Measure luggage, tools or sports equipment and consider how each item can be reached. A cupboard that requires unloading everything may not solve the original problem. A short list of awkward belongings can be more valuable to a designer than a folder containing dozens of attractive interiors.

Judge every option against the same brief

For each layout, record the needs it meets, the compromises it introduces and the cost information still missing. When a room changes, review access, furniture and services too. Focusing only on the overall area can miss a small alteration that makes everyday use much harder.

Separate a central material preference from a general reference image. If natural stone matters to you, the marble selection guide explains questions about supply and finished pieces. You might keep a material in one significant location and simplify elsewhere, rather than treating every surface as equally important.

When a model is part of the service, agree which BIM deliverables will help you compare alternatives. The representation should support decisions. Technical design and the applicable approval procedures remain separate parts of preparing a home for construction.

Keep a dated brief and record changes

Issue a simple document containing the budget, ranked requirements and unresolved questions. Maintain a dated record when priorities change. Our architect's fee guide connects expectations with professional tasks, while the project stages guide explains when different decisions are developed.

Use the whole-project budget calculator with the amounts you have established. Before the next meeting, identify three compromises you would accept if the estimate exceeds your resources. Tell us what your next home needs to do so the project conversation can start with useful information.