The first deep conversation I have with a client is paid — $500, credited to the project — and it typically runs one to two hours and we need 1-3 of them. In that time I need to understand the land, the family, the budget, the timeline, and the broad shape of what you're trying to build. The clients who get the most out of that time are not the ones who have done the most Pinterest scrolling. They're the ones who have thought about their family's needs.
What you should leave out
The Pinterest and Houzz scrolling is almost always a liability. I understand why people do it — they've been collecting images for years, they're excited to show me what they love, and it feels like productive preparation. But what those images usually represent is aesthetic preference in isolation from everything that matters about a custom home. A kitchen from Architectural Digest is stunning partly because of its proportions, its light, its materials — and partly because it was photographed by a professional under ideal conditions. It also exists on a hypothetical site with a hypothetical family in a hypothetical budget. None of those things are yours.
When a client brings their screenshots to our first conversation, the risk is that we spend an hour discussing what things look like rather than how the home needs to work. Aesthetics matter — I'm not dismissing them — but they're one o the last design decisions, not the first. Most people don't have the budget for what they want aesthetically. You need a house to put a gorgeous kitchen in first. You may have the best looking kitchen in the world, but you won't be happy in it if it doesn't suit your lifestyle. The pictures don't tell me about your family. The conversation does.
Leave out anything that answers a question before you've asked it. Floor plans downloaded from the internet. A friend's house you want to replicate. A specific square footage you've decided on before we've talked through what your family actually needs to accommodate. These things feel like preparation but they're often premature decisions — and premature decisions in the design phase have a way of constraining the conversation before it produces anything useful.
Also leave out your contractor's opinion about budget. Contractors quote to specific plans; before there are plans, their numbers are rough at best and misleading at worst. I'd rather we figure out what the home needs to be first, then work backward to understand what it will cost, than let a placeholder number limit what we consider.
What you should bring
A clear picture of your land
If you own land already, bring everything you have: the parcel map, the survey if it exists, any zoning documentation, the property address so I can pull satellite imagery. Know roughly where utilities are — or aren't. If you're off-grid or planning to be, know your water source situation. Know which direction is south and what's on each boundary. Know whether the land has a slope and which way it faces. Know what the views are and from where on the parcel.
If you don't own land yet, bring what you're looking for. We can talk through what land characteristics are important for the kind of home you're describing, which can actually help you evaluate parcels before you buy. Many of my clients come to that first conversation still searching for land, and it's often the most useful conversation they have during the search — because most people don't know what to look for from a build-ability standpoint until they've talked to someone who designs on land like theirs.
An honest budget range
Not a number you're testing me with. Not a number you calculated from a cost-per-square-foot article you read online. Don't tell me your budget is unlimited, it's not, we can exceed it. An honest assessment of what you can actually spend total. Your budget is (cash on hand + cash from the sale of real estate after taxes and commission + a mortgage you are comfortable with) - 10 to 15% as a contingency.
I ask about budget early because it changes everything downstream. A family with $350,000 to build a home and a family with $700,000 to build a home can both want the same thing — a comfortable, well-designed house on good land — but the path to getting there looks completely different. The floor plan is different. The mechanical systems are different. The finish selections are different. If I don't know your actual budget, I can't help you make a plan that you can actually execute.
On contingency: Whatever number you have in mind, hold back 10-15% of the construction cost to be held as a contingency reserve. Not because custom home builds always go over budget — mine didn't — but because the ones that do go over without a reserve in place are the ones that produce stress, compromises, and regret. If you don't use the contingency, you've saved money. If you need it and don't have it, you're making decisions under financial pressure during construction, which is among the worst conditions under which to make permanent decisions.
A description of how your family actually lives
This is the thing most clients don't bring and should. Not what you wish your family did, or how you imagine living in a new house — how your family actually functions on a typical Tuesday. Walk me through it. Who wakes up first and what do they do? How does the morning departure look? Where do people go when they come home at the end of the day? What does dinner look like — who cooks, who's underfoot, where do people sit? What happens after dinner? Where does gear go? Where does laundry pile up before it gets dealt with?
These questions feel mundane. They aren't. The answers to them are the inputs to the floor plan. If your wife cooks most evenings and wants to be part of the conversation while she does, that tells me something about how open the kitchen needs to be. If your kids do homework at the kitchen table while dinner is being made, that tells me something about how large that table needs to be and where it should sit relative to the kitchen. If you have a dog that comes in dirty from outside every day, that tells me something about the mudroom sequence. None of that is on Pinterest.
The things you've hated about every house you've lived in
I've asked this question enough times to know that most people have a list and that they've been carrying it for years. The laundry room that's always been in the wrong place. The kitchen that fights you every time you cook in it. The garage that never has room for the car. The bedroom that's either too hot or too cold depending on the season. The front door nobody uses because the real entry is through the garage.
These complaints are gold. They represent years of accumulated feedback from your actual life in actual houses. The pattern of recurring complaints tells me more about what your home needs to get right than almost anything else. I want to know every one of them.
The non-negotiables
Every family has a small list of things that are not flexible — features, spaces, or characteristics that the home must have regardless of budget pressure or design tradeoffs. It could be a wood-burning fireplace, a dedicated office with a door that closes, a mudroom that actually works for the family, or a shop on the property.
Bring that list — but be honest about the difference between a non-negotiable and a strong preference. Non-negotiables are things you would genuinely sacrifice other things for. Strong preferences are things you'd like but could live without if the tradeoffs were clear. Both are useful to know. Conflating them makes prioritization harder when the budget gets real.
The next ten years of your life
Not as a plan, necessarily — as a set of possibilities. Will your family grow? Will children leave home? Will elderly parents need to move in? Will your work situation change in a way that affects how you use the house during the day? Do you see this as your home for the rest of your life, or a fifteen-year house you might sell?
A home designed only for your life as it is today is a home that will fight you as your life changes. The decisions that accommodate future flexibility are almost always cheap to make during design and expensive to add later. Thinking about the next ten years doesn't require certainty — it just requires having thought about the question before we sit down together.
What the best first conversations look like
The best discovery conversations I have are with clients who came prepared but not over-prepared. They've thought about their land and can describe it. They have a good idea of the actual budget. They've walked through their current home recently and noticed the things that bother them. Spouses are on the same page about what they generally want from the home. They have questions they don't know the answers to.
That combination — genuine preparation and genuine uncertainty — is exactly what a good discovery conversation is designed to work through. I don't need you to have the answers before we talk. I need you to have thought about the questions. The answers are what we work out together.
The clients who get the least out of that first conversation are the ones who have already decided, in significant detail, what the house should be — and are looking for a designer to execute a vision rather than develop one. That's a different engagement than what I offer, and it tends to produce a different result. My best work isn't translating your mental picture into a drawing. It is asking the questions that surface the mental picture you haven't articulated yet — the one that, when it becomes a house, will feel more like yours than anything you could have described going in.
Read more here about how to start thinking about your future home and how to prepare for our conversation about it.