THE BRIEF: Before Before You Change Everything.

There is a particular moment at the beginning of a renovation when everything feels possible.

The Pinterest boards are multiplying. Someone has saved a kitchen they love in Copenhagen. The neighbour has recommended a builder. There is talk of knocking down a wall. Possibly several walls. And at some point someone will suggest a butler’s pantry.

It is all rather exciting.

But there is one question I think we are surprisingly bad at asking before we start renovating:

What exactly are we trying to fix?

Not what do we want to buy. Not what style do we like. Not even what do we want the new kitchen to look like.

What isn't working about the way we live in this house now?

Because those are quite different questions.

We have become rather obsessed with more

More storage. More bathrooms. More bedrooms. Bigger kitchens. Bigger islands. Bigger openings to the outdoor areas.

And, of course, more square metres.

Sometimes more really is the answer.

But I've walked through enough houses now to know that surprisingly often it isn't.

A house can have plenty of space and still use it badly. A large kitchen can function terribly. An enormous living room can somehow have nowhere sensible to put a sofa. A four-bedroom house can have five people fighting over one useful cupboard.

And then there are older homes, particularly around Sydney, where rooms that appear problematic on a floor plan can actually be part of what makes the house so lovely.

The instinct is often to open everything up.

I'm increasingly interested in asking whether we should.

Not every wall is the enemy

Open-plan living has given us some wonderful homes.

It has also given us enormous rooms in which the television, dishwasher, children, dinner guests and someone attempting a work call are all expected to coexist peacefully.

Sometimes a wall is useful.

Sometimes a doorway is in the wrong place. Sometimes changing the relationship between two rooms achieves more than making them one room. Sometimes the slightly awkward room you've been desperate to demolish is exactly the room you'll be grateful for when somebody wants to close a door.

This is where I think renovation becomes interesting.

The answer isn't automatically change more.

It's change the right things. And this is where you also start to spend wisely, after all a wall coming down is not always simply smashing a few bricks.

We also don't have to remove everything old

There is a strange moment that can happen when a house becomes a “project”.

Suddenly everything is under review.

The floors. The cornices. The doors. The fireplace. The slightly eccentric cupboard that has apparently survived three generations perfectly well but is now facing imminent demolition because it isn't quite symmetrical.

Of course, some things need to go.

But age isn't a design flaw.

In fact, one of the quickest ways to make an older home less interesting is to remove every piece of evidence that it was ever old.

I don't think the aim of renovating a character home should be to freeze it in time. Houses have to accommodate the way we live now. Kitchens have changed. Bathrooms have changed. Families have changed.

But there is a difference between modernising a house and erasing it.

The best renovations, to me, leave you slightly unsure where the old house finishes and the new intervention begins.

And then there is the kitchen

Kitchens deserve their own paragraph because they seem to have acquired an extraordinary list of compulsory accessories.

A spacious Island.

Butler's pantry.

Appliance cupboard.

Wine fridge.

Integrated everything.

None of these things is inherently good or bad. I design plenty of them.

But they are only useful if they solve a problem you actually have.

I would rather give a client a beautifully functioning kitchen with a generous preparation area and somewhere sensible to put the toaster than squeeze in a butler's pantry because we've collectively decided that desirable kitchens are supposed to have one.

The same applies throughout the house.

A design feature earns its place by improving the home, not by appearing frequently enough in our pinterest accounts.

Inspiration is useful. Observation is better.

Before a renovation, I often think the most useful thing you can do is stop looking at other people's houses for a moment and start paying attention to your own.

Where does everyone put their bags when they walk through the door?

Where does the morning bottleneck happen?

Which room do you naturally gravitate towards?

Which room does nobody use?

Where is the beautiful afternoon light?

Where do you end up drinking your coffee?

What are you forever carrying from one end of the house to the other?

Those rather mundane details tell you an enormous amount about what a home needs.

And they rarely appear on a moodboard.

The expensive decisions aren't always the obvious ones

People understandably worry about choosing the wrong stone or spending too much on a sofa.

I'm more concerned about the decisions underneath those decisions.

The kitchen positioned in the wrong part of the house.

Joinery designed after the electrical plan.

Lighting considered once the ceiling is already full of downlights.

Furniture selected after doorways, circulation and sightlines have been fixed.

A builder pricing something that hasn't actually been resolved yet.

Those are the decisions that can quietly dictate everything that follows.

And once construction starts, changing them becomes considerably less philosophical and considerably more expensive.

Perhaps the first question isn't “What do we want?”

Perhaps it is:

What do we already have?

What works?

What deserves to stay?

What could work considerably harder?

What genuinely needs changing?

And what are we about to spend money fixing simply because renovation has made us feel that we should?

There is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting a beautiful house. I make my living designing them.

But beauty is rarely the most interesting part of a good renovation.

The interesting part is working out how much needs to change — and having the confidence to leave the rest alone.

Because better space doesn't always mean more space. And a successful renovation isn't necessarily the one that changes the most.

It's the one that makes the right changes.