Laruelle Baranyay Architects
Your home, in your words.
Two parts. A short set of questions about how you live, then a schedule of what the house has to contain.
Answer what you can. This is a starting position rather than a commitment and everything in it stays open to discussion once we have the site in front of us.
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Seven questions before the list. The answers move the plan more than anything that follows, so they are worth a minute each.
Tell us where you want to be. Working out how to get the light there is our job.
The chair, the end of the bench, the step by the window. Tell us what makes it that spot rather than the one beside it. The reasons behind the choice tell us what you enjoy without having to think about it and they feed directly into the design.
The second answer is usually the more useful one. How you use the home you have now is the only hard evidence of how you actually live rather than how any of us imagine you will.
What you are carrying, where it lands, who is there, what you do first. Entries fail more often than any other part of a house and they are almost never briefed.
A house cannot be best in every season at once. Telling us which one you suffer through is more useful than asking for all four.
We are after a change in how you live rather than a room you are missing. Something you would do differently or more often or at all once you are in the house.
Rooms and spaces. Work down the list and mark each item. Anything you leave untouched we will treat as not required.
Marking something a priority tells us where it sits in your order of importance. It is not a list we are committing to build. The site, budget and the planning rules will all have a say.
Answer these as preferences rather than decisions. What is possible depends on the site and the planning rules. That part is ours to work out.
Style is the last thing we settle rather than the first and it follows from the plan. It still helps to know where your eye goes before we start.
Anything below ground needs its own daylight strategy or it becomes a place nobody goes.
Often more useful to us than what you like. Be blunt.
We are engaged for concept design only, so nothing here is a cost plan. It tells us the scale we are designing to, which matters from the first sketch rather than at the end.
Building work only. Not land, fees, furniture or landscaping.
Considered is good materials used carefully. Premium is bespoke joinery, high performance glazing and stone. Exceptional is bespoke throughout with no constraint on specification.
Settlement, a planning deadline, a lease ending, a family reason. If there is a date driving this, we need to know it now rather than later.
We never publish an exact address and we never share client names or any personal details. This covers drawings, renders and the thinking behind them, in our portfolio, on social media and on our YouTube channel. All we add is a sense of where in the world it sits. You decide how specific that is.
Never a suburb, a street or an address. Part of the world means something like southern Australia, the Mediterranean, Scandinavia, the Baltic coast or the Pacific north west.
If there is anything in particular you would like us to hold back, tell us here.
Thank you. Your brief has been sent to us and we will be in touch shortly.