The design brief - Archer Design Studio

Written by: Erin Rogers

April 2026

Photography: Taylah Cunningham Photography

The design brief

For many people, the home is their most private space, it’s a place for retreat, rest and calm as well as a backdrop for coming together and sharing. Unlike public buildings where we are designing for the interests of a collective, the home is the expression and reflection of an individual, small group or family. When it comes to designing a home, it is important for us to understand the way our clients want to live, what the home needs to do for them and allow them to do. Typically, this comes in the form of a design brief.

When assembling a brief many clients default to qualifiable real estate values - 3-bedrooms, 2-bathrooms, 2 car garage, walk in pantry – these values are an important starting block but in no way can they express the nuance and poetics of daily life, the quality or feeling the spaces need to evoke or the way in which the home needs to operate. For us, a brief is more about daily, monthly and yearly patterns, the habits, rituals and activities, the people and their values. To understand this, we find the stories and rhythms of the life to be lived in the home tells us a great deal more.

We want to know that ‘study’ doesn’t just mean a space for the kids to do their homework, but that it might mean late night international meetings that can’t disrupt the rest of the house, or a collaborative space for a couple to come together to read or study from. We want to know that ‘kitchen’ doesn’t only mean cooking space, but that it is the social hub where everyone comes together before setting off for the day, or a place for sharing and generosity with friends and family, or the place that no matter what, will not stay tidy and is preferably hidden away. In this same way ‘rumpus’ and ‘media’ could imply something similar and we can interrogate a correlation or overlap and rationalise spaces to be more efficient and adaptive.

We approach these discussions not only as a starting point and idea generator, but use them as a reference for us to carefully test design solutions against, imagining the story of our clients’ lives playing out in the spaces we are designing. Typically however, as we move through the design process, the brief also develops with it. The process is always fluid, a matter of talking, sketching, testing, talking, and the process repeats until we come to the right answer. We approach each design from a place of insight and need to have a level of spatial intelligence and anticipating people’s needs however, we also ask questions and listen from a place of empathy, flexibility and respect.

In the end, we are conscious that a home will be a representation of the client, as interpreted and composed by the architect so we prefer to design spaces that can absorb and reflect our clients’ personalities over time, instead of curating buildings that are indefinitely refined and completed. We actively leave space for our clients to fill in the metaphorical blanks in ways that to us, are unexpected and unpredictable. We find this is particularly prevalent in the landscapes that homes are eventually nestled into. Landscapes are inevitably something that take time and this slower pace of ‘settling in’ is something we look to integrate into the design of our homes.

Over the span of our work, we find it interesting to observe the subtle developments, similarities and differences in the ways people prefer to live. We find some things are consistent amongst many of our clients: the kitchen being the social hub, a love of sunlight and living with the rhythm of the seasons, connection to outdoor spaces and the ability to use different parts of the outdoor spaces throughout the whole year.

If we look at this more broadly, the houses we build over a period of time are a representation of that point in time’s ‘way of life’, making it clear that it is just as important for us to look at the collective whole as well as the individual spaces. Architecture isn’t solely about buildings, it’s about the people and life within and with each client we look forward to learning, testing and developing the ideas around the way we live.