Questions to Ask When Designing a House
Questions for the design stage of a new house or a major remodel, to work through with your architect or designer while the drawings can still change: how the plan handles daily traffic, orientation and light, storage you have actually measured, noise between rooms, running costs, and what happens to the budget if the price comes in high.
The questions
Open any question for the note
Which rooms will we actually spend most of our waking hours in?
Why ask it
Households routinely spend the design budget on the room they use twice a year. Count the hours honestly: if that is the kitchen table and one sofa, those two places deserve the best light, the best view, and the best detailing, and the formal dining room can be small or absent.
Which way does the plot face, and what will that do to those rooms in summer and winter?
Why ask it
Orientation is the one decision you cannot buy your way out of later. Ask where the sun is at breakfast, at four in the afternoon in July, and at midday in December, and ask specifically how the glazing avoids overheating, since large windows facing the afternoon sun make a room unusable in a heatwave.
What happens in the first two metres inside the front door?
Why ask it
Coats, shoes, bags, post, deliveries, and a wet dog all land in the same square metre, and if there is nowhere for them the whole house looks cluttered. Ask to see where each of those goes on the drawing rather than assuming a hook will appear.
How far is it from where the car parks to where the shopping gets put away?
Why ask it
This is the trip you make several times a week for decades, and it is often the route nobody drew. Trace it on the plan: how many doors, steps, and corners, and whether it passes through the room where people are sitting.
Where do the bins live, inside and out?
Why ask it
Kitchen bins, recycling, and the wheeled bins outside are a genuinely awkward design problem, and they get solved at the end by putting them somewhere visible and inconvenient. Ask where they stand and what route they take to the street on collection day.
When two people are cooking, who stands where?
Why ask it
Most kitchen frustration is about traffic, not layout style: someone opening the oven behind someone at the sink, or a route through the work area to the garden. Walk the imaginary meal with the plan in front of you and look for where two people collide.
Have we drawn our real furniture into these rooms, at its real size?
Why ask it
Drawings are usually populated with slightly undersized furniture, which makes every room look generous. Measure your actual sofa, bed, table, and wardrobe, and ask for them to be drawn in with the doors and drawers shown open. Rooms that only work with smaller furniture are too small.
Where does laundry happen, and how far is it from where clothes are worn and kept?
Why ask it
A laundry in the basement or garage means carrying baskets past everyone, twice, forever. Ask where wet washing dries in bad weather, which is the part almost always left out and which then colonises the nicest warm room in the house.
What are we storing, and have we measured it?
Why ask it
Storage is the most commonly under-specified thing in a new house because it is invisible in a rendering. Write the list: bikes, suitcases, tools, sports kit, seasonal boxes, spare bedding, the vacuum. Then check each one has a named place with the right dimensions.
What will we be able to hear from the bedrooms?
Why ask it
Ask about four sources separately: the road, the plumbing, the mechanical plant, and the room above or next door. Acoustic separation is cheap while the walls and floors are being designed and nearly impossible to add afterwards, so this is a question with a deadline.
Where do the bathrooms sit relative to the bedrooms, and who walks past whom?
Why ask it
Plans that look fine can produce a teenager crossing the living room in a towel, or a guest toilet opening onto the dining table. Trace the night-time and morning routes for each person in the household and see whose privacy the layout quietly spends.
If one of us could not manage stairs for a few months, would this house still work?
Why ask it
This is a short-term question as much as a long-term one, since a knee operation or a broken ankle happens to most households eventually. A ground floor with a toilet, a shower, and somewhere to sleep is worth designing in now, when it costs nothing but arrangement.
Are the front door, the main corridor, and at least one bathroom wide enough for a wheelchair?
Why ask it
Ask for the actual dimensions and the turning circles rather than a reassurance, and check the door swings, which are what usually make an otherwise adequate bathroom unusable. Retrofitting width means moving walls; getting it right on paper costs a conversation.
Where do the boiler, hot water, ventilation, and meters go, and how loud are they?
Why ask it
Plant tends to be located last and ends up in a cupboard next to a bedroom, humming at three in the morning. Ask what each item is, how big it is, where the noise and the pipe runs go, and how someone will reach it to service it.
How will this house be heated and cooled, and what should it cost to run?
Why ask it
Get numbers, or at least a modelled estimate, rather than adjectives about efficiency. The heating choice interacts with insulation, glazing, and airtightness, so it is a design decision, not a purchase you make at the end, and the running cost is the part you live with.
Which parts of this are fixed forever, and which can be changed later?
Why ask it
Structure, orientation, window openings, drainage, and the position of wet rooms are effectively permanent, while kitchens, finishes, and fittings are all replaceable. Knowing which is which tells you exactly where to spend the argument and where to accept a compromise for now.
Which finishes will look tired in five years with this household in them?
Why ask it
Dogs, small children, bikes, and a wet climate all defeat certain materials, and the sample board will not tell you that. Ask specifically about the floor at the back door, the worktop, the bathroom grout, and anything white at hand height.
How much does this design depend on us being tidy people?
Why ask it
Open shelves, glass, and continuous sightlines are beautiful when a house is empty. If your household reality is otherwise, say so out loud, because a designer can plan for mess with doors and thresholds, and cannot plan for a version of you that does not exist.
What is the contingency, and what comes out first if the price comes back high?
Why ask it
Every project meets this moment, and the households that cope have already ranked their list. Agree the order now, while nobody is under pressure, and ask which items must be decided early because they are built in rather than fitted at the end.
What do the planning rules and the building code allow here, and has anything similar been refused nearby?
Why ask it
Height, boundary setbacks, overlooking, and permitted materials can all reshape the design, and local precedent tells you what an application is likely to survive. This is worth resolving before you fall in love with a drawing that cannot be built.
What will the neighbours see, and what will we see when the trees are bare?
Why ask it
Overlooking runs both ways and is judged on a summer site visit with full foliage. Ask what the winter view is, and where the neighbours' windows and future extensions point, since a screen of leaves is not a permanent part of the design.
If we needed another room in ten years, where would it go?
Why ask it
You are not committing to build it, only checking that the design does not foreclose it. Ask whether the roof could be used, whether services could reach the far end, and whether the structure would allow an opening. This question also flushes out plans that only work at exactly today's household size.
Who makes the final call, and how do we settle it when the two of us disagree?
Why ask it
House design produces hundreds of decisions under time pressure, and a couple who has not agreed a method will spend that pressure on each other. Deciding in advance which areas each of you owns, and what happens on a genuine deadlock, is worth more than any single design choice.
Getting the design right on paper
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
Who can answer what
Your architect or designer
Layout, light, orientation, how the spaces work together, what the planning rules permit. Best used early and paid to explore options rather than to draw the first idea you had.
The builder or contractor
What things cost, what is difficult on this site, and which details will be simplified on site if the drawing is ambitious. Getting a builder's view before the design is frozen saves the most money.
The engineer and services designer
Spans, foundations, drainage runs, plant sizing and noise. These constraints move walls, so surface them before the layout is fixed rather than after.
The planning or building department
A short pre-application conversation is usually free and tells you what the local rules actually mean in practice, including recent refusals nearby.
Test the plan in the real world
- Tape the room sizes out on a floor or a lawn and put chairs in them. Numbers on a page do not tell you what four metres feels like.
- Stand on the site at the times of day you care about, and if possible in two different seasons, before the window positions are fixed.
- Visit a finished house by the same designer or builder, and ask the owners what they would change.
- Walk your own routine through the drawing out loud: waking, leaving, coming home, cooking, bedtime. Every stall is a design problem.
- Photograph the messiest corner of your current home and design a place for exactly that.
- Count the doors, steps, and corners on the routes you use most, and see whether any of them can be removed.
Decide in the right order
- Site and orientation first: everything else is downstream of where the sun and the noise come from.
- Then the plan: room relationships, circulation, where the wet rooms stack, where the plant sits.
- Then the envelope: insulation, glazing, airtightness, and the heating system, which are one decision rather than four.
- Then structure and services coordination, before any finishes are chosen.
- Finishes and fittings last, and only after the contingency and the cut list are agreed.
- Anything built into the fabric, wiring, drainage, blocking for future grab rails, has to be decided before the walls close.
Where house designs commonly go wrong
Rooms sized for the photograph
Generous living space with no storage, no utility, and nowhere for coats is a very common trade, and it is the one people regret within a year.
Too much glass on the wrong side
Large openings facing the afternoon sun without shading produce a room that is too hot to sit in for part of the year, and mechanical cooling is an expensive way to correct a drawing.
Circulation nobody costed
Long corridors and double-height voids are floor area you pay to build, heat, and clean. Ask what percentage of the plan is circulation.
Acoustics left until later
Noise between floors, plumbing in party walls, and plant next to bedrooms cannot be fixed once built without opening the structure again.
Designing for resale instead of for you
Chasing a hypothetical future buyer usually produces a house that suits nobody in particular, including the household living in it.
No agreed cut list
When the price comes back high and there is no ranking, the cuts fall on whatever is easiest to remove late, which is usually insulation, storage, and landscaping.