How we measure: the four-page brief

Before a single cabinet is drawn, we write the kitchen down. Four pages of plain prose — what the room is for, who uses it, when, and how. The brief is not a survey form; it is closer to an interview. We ask questions a builder would not ask. By the end we have a written description of the room you actually want, not the room you think you want.

Page one is the people. Who lives here. How tall the cooks are. Who reaches the top shelf. Whether children open every drawer at some point in the day. Whether the dog is a counter-grazer. None of this is sentimental — every one of these has a cabinet-height implication.

Page two is the cooking. What do you actually make. Where the espresso machine lives. Whether you bake bread (the prep counter changes), keep a small herb garden on the sill (window depth changes), entertain weekly (the island scales). We ask to see the dish you cook most often, mid-prep, and we will photograph the workflow.

Page three is the constraints. The non-negotiables and the absolutely-nots. The drawer your last kitchen got wrong. The cabinet you wish was somewhere else. The colour you have learned the hard way you do not want, no matter how good it looks at the showroom.

Page four is the room itself. Light direction by hour, the squareness (or not) of the existing walls, the location of every bit of mechanical service. We hand-measure with a steel rule and a laser; we do not trust the architect's drawings, even good architects' drawings. Every kitchen we have built has had at least one wall that the original drawings called square and was not.

The brief sits next to the drawing for the entire design phase. When a debate comes up about a cabinet width, a counter overhang, a drawer count — we go back to the brief. The brief is on your side, in your own words. It saves weeks of revisions later because the answers are in writing from week one.