Studio Seven
How to brief a kitchen designer properly
A good brief is not a shopping list of finishes. It is a description of how the room has to work, and it is the single biggest influence on whether the finished kitchen feels designed or assembled.
26 August 2026 · 5 min read
In this piece
Start with how the room fails today
The most useful thing a client can tell a designer is what currently goes wrong. Two people colliding at the oven, a bin in the wrong place, a worktop that is always covered because there is nowhere else to put anything. Those irritations are specific, and specific problems generate real design decisions.
Finish preferences are easy to change late; layout logic is not. If the brief opens with cabinet colours, the conversation tends to skip the part that decides whether the kitchen is pleasant to use in five years’ time.
Bring the practical constraints early
Where the boiler sits, which wall carries the flue, whether the floor is solid or suspended, where the water comes in, these shape cost more than any door style. Bringing them to the first consultation avoids a design that has to be unpicked after the survey.
The same goes for the programme. A kitchen that has to be usable before Christmas and a kitchen with an open date are two different projects, because lead times on cabinetry, stone and appliances rarely move to suit a deadline set afterwards.
Be honest about the budget bracket
A bracket is enough, nobody needs a precise figure at the first meeting. But a designer who knows the bracket can put the money where it will be felt daily, usually in cabinet construction, drawer hardware and worktops, rather than spreading it thinly across features that photograph well and are used twice a year.
Being open about budget from the start saves everybody a polite fiction. It also allows a designer to say plainly when a brief and a budget do not meet, which is far better news early than late.
What to bring to the consultation
A rough floor plan or the estate agent’s plan, photographs of the room from two corners, a note of appliances you intend to keep, and three or four images of rooms you like, with a sentence on what you like about each. That last part matters: an image without a reason is ambiguous, and ambiguity gets designed into the drawing.
If an architect or interior designer is already involved, bring their drawings rather than a redrawn version. We would rather coordinate with the live information than with a copy.
