Paul and Sonya came to ArchIdea with a prepared Brief document.

It had floor plans, annotations, a rendered front elevation in dark grey with black trim, and a numbered list of work. That level of detail had a reason. They’d already been through a design process with another architect and came away feeling the building itself hadn’t been understood. The previous proposal included a spiral staircase, which was not acceptable for them.

So, they started working out their own solutions because no one had yet looked closely at what the house was actually doing.

Their goals were clear. The front of the house felt unbalanced. Two teenage daughters were sharing bedrooms. They wanted to go all electric, with an induction cooktop, reverse cycle heating and more solar. They wanted a modern, contemporary look that sat comfortably beside their neighbours, nothing imposing, and they wanted to keep the roof eaves.

Their assumption was that the house needed to grow.

Our first question was whether it did.

We suggested a site visit before responding to any of it.

On that first visit we were in the walls, tapping to find what was structural and counting bricks before we drew a single line.

Paul and Sonya told us later that was the moment they knew we understood building, not just design, which was exactly what they’d felt was missing.

What we found changed the brief. The ground floor had a bar and entertainment area the family never used. Built into the side of the hill, it felt dark and closed off, so it sat empty while two teenage girls shared bedrooms upstairs.

That was the real brief. Not the kitchen. The house had the space the family needed. It was just being used for the wrong thing.

The family didn’t need a lot more building.

They needed what was already there to work differently, plus one small extension in the right place.

We began with Concept Design and Estimation: working the whole scope through with Paul and Sonya and putting a cost against it before anything was committed.

The first concept included a balcony over the front porch and the master bedroom’s arched window converted to a door. Both looked right on paper. The costing showed what they would take from everything else.

Paul said of that stage:

“It was the best thing we ever did.”

Then came the decision. The front balcony came off, and a curved canopy went in its place. It’s cleaner, it repeats the arch, and it costs far less. The saving went into a single garage door, which finally made the garage usable.

Good design here wasn’t adding the balcony. It was knowing which decision to pay for.

What the costing stage looks like

Before anything is committed, we put the whole scope into a cost plan that breaks it into trades. This is Walden’s first version, at schematic design stage. It’s indicative only, and it predates the value management that removed the front balcony and arched glass dooe was replaced with the window on the First Floor. Seeing where the money sits is what made that decision easy.

The unused bar and entertainment area became two proper bedrooms with built-in robes, alongside the retained study and laundry and a new bathroom. The girls got their own space and the parents got theirs.

The original staircase had been badly placed – it ate into the floor plan and made the house awkward to move through. We relocated it. That single decision unlocked the spatial logic of the whole home and made the layout feel considered rather than accidental.

The kitchen and living area the family actually used every day got the upgrade the brief originally asked for — but now it worked with a house that had been properly reorganised, rather than being a patch on top of an unresolved plan.

We raised the kitchen bench to a height that actually suited how the client cooks. Years of back strain from a bench that was too low, solved in a specification that cost nothing extra. The kind of detail that only comes from asking the right questions before picking finishes.

The original arched window was a feature worth holding onto. Rather than defaulting to the square windows in the first concept, we repeated the arch’s curve through the new work — in the openings, in the detailing, in the street elevation.

The result is a house with a street presence nothing else on the block has. The renovation reads as intentional, not as something that happened in stages.