Guide

How to write a brief an architect can actually use

Two pages, eleven answers and a drawing of the plot. It is the difference between paying for discovery and paying for design.

You need a brief before you pay for drawings

You sit down with an architect with photo clippings and a list of wishes. You ask for three bedrooms, a pooja room, deep balconies, and large windows. You expect a floor plan in return.

A wish list is not a design brief. A wish list describes finishes and aspirations, but it gives no technical limits. It does not tell the designer how your plot handles water, where the road enters, or how your family moves between rooms.

When you start without a brief, you pay your architect to do basic discovery work. An architect's concept set for a house of this size typically costs in the tens of thousands of rupees and takes days to weeks. If those billable days go toward figuring out basic boundary geometry, you waste money before real design begins.

The eleven answers that set your dimensions

A functional brief requires exactly eleven decisions. Each decision changes a physical variable in your home. In our practice, if an answer cannot move a wall, we do not ask it.

Nothing in your brief is mandatory except the plot boundary and the built area. The plot boundary, the target area, the occupant count, and the road side form the base. Everything else hangs off these four inputs.

The table below shows what our rule base computes for standard Indian residential plots after municipal setbacks:

Your budget sets your built area ceiling. Construction cost anchors in India run ₹1,600–2,000 per sq ft for a basic finish, ₹2,000–2,800 per sq ft for a standard finish, and ₹2,800–4,500+ per sq ft for a premium finish. On a 995 sq ft house we drew, a basic rate of ₹1,700 per sq ft comes out to about ₹16.9 lakh. These are planning figures, not quotations, but they define your footprint early.

Your occupant count dictates your utility sizes. IS 1172 sets daily domestic water demand at 135 litres per person per day. IS 2470 Table 1 requires septic tank capacity sized directly from occupant count, never from a standard catalogue size.

The road side fixes your entrance and your internal orientation. At latitudes between 8°N and 16°N, road placement determines your shading strategy and kitchen location.

How to apply these rules to your rooms

Your brief must state requirements rather than room solutions. Tell the architect how many people sleep in the house and how you cook. Do not hand them a pre-drawn sketch with fixed interior partitions.

Start with the site boundaries and the road side. The road fixes your gate and main entrance. In our practice, rooms follow a set functional sequence: kitchen to dining, then dining to living. Cooking smoke must never share air with your living space without ducted extract.

Fix your internal circulation before placing furniture. Part 3 of the National Building Code sets the minimum corridor clear width at 914 mm. The National Building Code also sets the general circulation minimum for any habitable space at 914 mm. In our practice, an aisle between kitchen counters requires 1220 mm for two people working together.

Fit your furniture to the clearances rather than stretching the rooms to fit oversized pieces. On a 3,450 × 3,300 mm master bedroom we drew, placing a 1370 × 1900 mm double bed left 965 mm of clear floor on each side and 1,550 mm at the foot. A 1520 mm queen bed in a 3300 mm wide room leaves 890 mm on each side. That falls 24 mm short of the 914 mm clearance required by our practice, forcing you to turn sideways to reach your wardrobe.

Group your plumbing early. Group bathrooms into one central wet core. This keeps drainage runs short and provides acoustic separation between bedrooms and living spaces. Part 8 of the National Building Code requires ventilation openings on two different faces for every habitable room. A fan alone is not ventilation.

Keep site sanitation clearances in mind during the brief. Both TNCDBR 2019 and IS 2470 require at least 18 m of separation between a septic tank and a borewell. On a 40 × 60 ft plot, the diagonal measures about 22 m. That leaves only opposite corners available for water and waste. A 30 × 40 ft plot cannot achieve an 18 m separation at all, which means you must connect to municipal services instead of an on-site borewell.

The layout defects an early brief prevents

A weak brief leads to structural and spatial clashes that cost real money to fix during drafting or masonry work.

In our own measured drawings, an automated checker caught a corridor drawn at 804 mm clear width instead of the 914 mm National Building Code minimum. The draftsman measured from the rough centerline, and the 110 mm partition ate directly into the passage. Catching that defect prevented losing 110 mm of walking space on the busiest route in the house.

In another drawing pass, door swings conflicted with interior fixtures. One bedroom door leaf struck a wardrobe face by 567 mm. The door could not swing open. In a bathroom on the same plan, the door leaf struck a counter vanity by 290 mm, which forced the vanity to be shortened.

On site drainage, an early drawing placed a septic tank just 2.6 m from the exterior wall based on an arbitrary plot fraction. IS 2470 requires a septic tank to sit at least 15 m from a building, or its foul vent must rise at least 2 m above the roofline. Siting the tank without checking plot geometry risks contaminating your borewell or failing municipal approvals.

Discovering these errors after an architect spends three weeks drawing costs tens of thousands of rupees in rework fees. Finding them on site during bricklaying costs far more in demolished masonry.

What this means for your plan

Check your exact plot dimensions, the road orientation, and your target square footage before your first design meeting. Ask your architect to maintain the National Building Code 914 mm circulation clear width along all interior paths and beside every bed. Our tool applies these clearance rules and sanitation offsets automatically when it draws your plan. It gives you a dimensioned, checked brief so your paid design hours go into building details rather than basic corrections.

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