Process · 21 May 2026 · 7 min read
What a Floor Plan Can Tell You
Long before a room has a colour, it has a shape. Most of what makes a room work — or not — is decided at this stage.
A floor plan looks like the least emotional document in the whole process: lines, dimensions, a few labels. But read carefully, it tells you almost everything about how a room will actually be lived in.
Where the doors sit tells you the room's natural sequence — the path a person takes without thinking about it. Where the windows sit tells you where light will fall across the day, and which wall will always feel like the "back" of the room. The gap between a sofa and a wall tells you whether a room will feel generous or cramped, regardless of what colour that wall eventually becomes.
A plan is not a formality before the design starts. It is where most of the important decisions are already being made.
On The Courtyard House, the plan revealed the problem before we'd chosen a single material: three separate living spaces with no shared circulation, each one requiring a detour through a hallway to reach the next. The courtyard we eventually built was already implied by the gaps in that first drawing.
This is why we ask to see — or draw — a plan before anything else. It's the only document that tells you the truth about a room before it's been decorated into looking a certain way.