Making the most of your land and plans

Without an excellent development feasibility study to highlight issues and opportunities, home design projects can often fail to unlock the full potential of land, as Borland Architecture Director Roger Borland explains.

It all begins with an idea - an idea that’s been tempting you for years: a home of your own. Not someone else’s home that you have to adapt to, but a house designed specifically for you. You want your bedroom facing the sunrise with the sound of birds in nearby trees to gently wake you each morning. You want to embrace the cold winters morning but not before you have seamlessly executed your morning routine in absolute luxury. It’s all about you, at least until the kids wake up!

There are millions of variations on this dream but only one of them is uniquely yours. Every great bespoke house has this aspiration at its core. The ability to tailor a design to suit your aesthetic and lifestyle makes it personal and turns a house into the ultimate home. This briefing process is not singular but will continue to evolve over the whole design journey, however, it’s critical to lay out the most important fundamentals as early as possible.

So step one of good development feasibility is to grasp what it is about the proposed house that will make it different. This will, in turn, create a series of knock-on effects, all of which are probably going to affect the geometry, orientation, scale, internal and external connections, which inform the initial design ideas. 

Step two is evaluating the land. Perhaps you already have the site. In this situation, the feasibility process is more linear. Can the brief be realised, given the site constraints? We often work with clients prior to the purchase of their land. As a designer, this offers the best opportunity to inform and educate our clients on the pros and cons of each potential site, ultimately resulting in the acquisition of a site that’s going to allow for the best realisation of the given brief. 

The basis of any good development feasibility study is identifying the opportunities and constraints of the given parcel of land and then having the vision to understand if the given brief can be realised to its potential, if changes need to be made, or if it’s simply not feasible. It’s better to understand this at step one of the process rather than committing to a dud site and having a design full of compromises.

Once satisfied that a positive outcome can be achieved, we prove those ideas in basic planning and block forms to offer assurances in the form of diagrammatic sketches. These drawings are the invention of the project and are often kept to remind us of the foundations of the ideas. They can be of critical importance as a reference during the development of the project, bringing everyone back to the core design intent and ensuring that the big ideas that gave birth to the project are still fundamental to its development.

The final step of good feasibility is to ensure that the proposed concepts can be constructed within a given budget. An experienced architect should be able to offer advice on likely costs per m2 with allowances made for specific design features which have been identified as being complex. The site must also be considered. Are there potential construction constraints such as site slope, access and trees that will cause premiums to be added by a builder? If the build is likely to be complex, our level of confidence in cost may be affected. In those situations, we will seek advice from one of our friendly trusted builders to firm up our advice.

It’s probable that the first-cut design ideas uncovered in the development feasibility study are off the mark from a budget or briefing point of view. In this instance, it’s always prudent to have an open conversation with the client to determine whether an alternative feasibility study needs to be drawn up or whether the initial ideas can be developed easily within the schematic design to continue along the design route.