The Things You Only Get One Go At

I'm moving house, and writing this between boxes.

We've been in the current place twenty years. It works. The layout suits us, the furniture sits where it should, the pictures are on the right walls. Almost none of that was planned. It arrived through two decades of putting things somewhere, living with them, deciding they were wrong and moving them again.

There's one exception. When we extended the kitchen I visualised it to within an inch of its life. Every sightline, every height, the lot.

Both of Those Were Right

It took until this week, carrying boxes, to notice that those two things aren't in conflict.

A picture on a wall costs nothing to get wrong. A hook, a bit of filler, an afternoon. You're better off living with it for a month than modelling it, because a month of living with it tells you things no image can.

The kitchen was different. One go. Steel in, floor down, money spent, and no sensible way back if the light turned out wrong or the island sat two hundred millimetres too far forward. That decision deserved every hour I put into it.

The New House

The house we're moving to is lovely. The current owners have made a good job of it, which is a large part of why we're going. And I have very little idea where anything will go. The art, the furniture, which rooms want repainting and in what, where the planting should sit in the garden.

I keep catching myself thinking I should model it, because I can, and because it's what I do all day. I'm not going to. We'll live in it for a year and get a few things wrong, the same as last time. That isn't laziness. It's the right tool for a cheap and reversible decision.

The real advantage of knowing how to visualise something is knowing when not to.

Which Brings Me to Your Scheme

A site is a good deal less forgiving. You can move almost anything while it's still a drawing. Once the steel is up and the levels are in, a fair amount of it has stopped being a decision at all.

The same sorting applies, with one caution that matters more than the sorting does. It doesn't sort by type of work.

Height and position. The relationship to the houses behind. Levels across the site. Which way the yard faces, and what that means for the people living with it. Those usually sit in the first group, because putting them right afterwards involves a good deal more than a conversation with the contractor.

A sign. A paint colour. The exact position of one tree. Usually the second group.

Usually. Two weeks ago I spent an entire newsletter arguing that landscape does most of the work on an industrial scheme, and I meant it. A tree that's decorative on one site is the mitigation a consent depends on somewhere else. A lighting column is a detail until it's thirty metres from somebody's bedroom window. A cladding colour is a preference until there's a condition attached to it.

So the question isn't which category a decision falls into. It's how much trouble you're in if it turns out to be wrong.

And Who Else Has to See It

There's a second test sitting alongside the first, and I nearly missed it because it doesn't apply to me.

I can usually stand in an empty room and see it. That's thirty years of doing this rather than any particular gift, and it's a learned skill that looks from the outside like an instinct. Plenty of perfectly capable people have never had a reason to learn it.

So a decision can be irreversible, and completely clear to you, and still need an image. You aren't the only person who has to say yes to it. A committee, a board, a funder, the twelve households on the lane. Some of them will read a drawing quite happily. Others won't, and nobody is going to volunteer which group they're in.

The Awkward Bit

Here's the part I'd be glad to hear argued against.

The decisions that are easiest to hold an opinion about tend to attract the most discussion, whether or not they're the ones that matter.

A room full of people can spend twenty minutes on a cladding colour. Everybody has a view, everybody can defend it, and the conversation more or less runs itself. Whether the building will feel oppressive from the garden behind it might get two minutes, partly because nobody is quite sure what to say about it.

That doesn't make the second decision less important. More often it means it hasn't been shown well enough for anyone to have an opinion in the first place.

Which is the best argument for an image I know of. Not that it helps people decide, but that it lets them join in.

There are perfectly good reasons to commission pictures of things you could change later, and marketing is the obvious one. But if the purpose of the exercise is to stop something going wrong, a beautiful set of images of reversible decisions is quite an expensive way to decorate a meeting.

Back to the Boxes

If you've a scheme in design at the moment, I'd ask two things of it. Which decisions would be hardest to undo once it's built, and are those the ones you've looked at hardest? And does everybody who has to approve them actually understand what they're agreeing to?

Everything else can wait until you're living in it.

Normal service next week, once I've found the kettle.

Rich

PS: Twenty years of doing this for a living and I still hang pictures by holding one up while somebody stands back and says "left a bit". I've yet to find a better method.