When people begin planning a new home, extension or major renovation, most of their attention naturally goes towards the building. They think about the kitchen, the number of bedrooms, the size of the glazing, the materials and how the internal spaces will work. The garden is often left until later. Sometimes it is represented on the planning drawings by little more than an area of green surrounding the proposed building. The assumption is that the landscape can be dealt with once the...

Most people do not realise how much trust is involved when you ask someone to design your home. You are not just asking for a set of drawings. You are putting your hard-earned money, your future plans, your family life and often years of work into someone else’s hands. That matters to me. It matters because I have seen both sides of the construction industry. I have been on site. I have worked with drawings that did not quite make sense in the real world. I have seen what happens when things...

A conversation with a builder recently got me thinking. He works with a number of different architectural practices and told me that some projects arrive with huge drawing packages, whilst others are built successfully from a surprisingly small amount of information. His argument was simple. The more information a builder receives, the more they have to account for when pricing the work. More details can sometimes mean more questions, more assumptions and ultimately higher costs. At first, I...