Stage 1: Briefing

Welcome to Westgarth Studio! We are thrilled you have selected us to be your Architect, and we are excited to be starting this journey with you. Now that you are on-board, we want to get to know you and your project. With this in mind, our first step is to arrange a briefing workshop with you in the convenience and comfort of your own home or over zoom, whichever is easier for you.

So what does this involve?

+ At our appointed time, we will come to you, and over casual conversation, we will take you through a process of understanding your functional requirements. We will delve into as much detail as possible to ascertain your needs, and find out what will work best for you.

+ We discuss your anticipated budget, and the options available to you, marking out a road-map for the way forward.

+ While at your home we also review the existing site conditions and take preliminary measurements and photographs.

Do I need to prepare any information or have any existing knowledge of design or the process?

+ Once appointed, we issue you with a preliminary briefing document customised for your project. This document will get you thinking about what is important to you and what you are trying to achieve. We ask that you have this completed to discuss during the briefing workshop.

+ We ask you to compile any existing site information such as the title / drawings / photographs / measurements you may already have of your site. Don’t worry if you don’t have these or know what they are - we can take care of these if required.

+ We also ask you to compile any imagery that resonates with you. This is an opportunity to show us who you are, and your preferred look and feel for the project. This is your project and we want to understand what is important to you.

What happens after the workshop?

+ Depending on the site information you already have available, we arrange the engagement of a land surveyor on your behalf, obtain a title search, undertake drafting of existing conditions plans & elevations, and conduct preliminary investigations of council zoning and guidelines.

+ We document the discussions and findings of the day into a return brief document which we will forward to you for your comment.

+ The brief is updated and issued to you, then it's on to Sketch Design.

So what’s happens during Sketch Design?

…a good topic for our next blog