How to Prepare for an Architect Consultation in London

Why preparation changes the fee conversation

A useful first conversation is not a pitch deck. It is a structured check: what the property is, what you want, what the planning and lease context allows, and which drawing stage you actually need. Owners who arrive with a clear address pack and a short brief get a clearer route and a fixed-fee proposal sooner. Owners who only say “we want more light” often pay for an extra loop of clarification before any design starts.

We publish fixed-fee packages and a £395 route review that is credited if you proceed — see our architect fees guide and packages page — so the goal of the first call is to match your project to the right stage, not to invent a mystery percentage.

The address pack (bring this)

Full postal address and postcode — especially important in places like Highgate where the pin can sit in more than one borough.

Property type: house or flat; freehold or leasehold; any known listing or conservation-area status.

Photos of the front, rear and main rooms you want to change. A phone set is fine. For sloping gardens, a photo looking up and down the garden helps more than a floor-plan sketch.

Any previous drawings, surveys or planning decisions — even refusals are useful history.

For flats: the lease, freeholder or managing agent name, and whether you have started a Licence to Alter conversation.

Write a short brief before the call

Three to six sentences is enough. What rooms fail today? Who uses the house? Do you need more family space, a loft bedroom, a basement study, or a flat reconfiguration? What must not change — a front elevation, a garden tree, a neighbour relationship?

Add rough constraints: target start window, whether you have a builder already, and whether budget is fixed or exploratory. You do not need a full cost plan. You do need to say if the project is “maximum space” or “best room within a defined spend”, because those briefs produce different designs.

Questions worth asking any practice

Who will actually run the drawings day to day? Which approval routes do you expect for this address? What is excluded from the fee — survey, structural engineer, party wall, council charges? How many design revisions are included? Will the same team take the project through building regulations, or only to planning?

Ask how they handle conservation areas, Article 4 streets, and multi-lease buildings if that is your property. Vague answers are a signal. Specific process answers are the ones that protect fees later.

What a good first response looks like

You should leave with a likely route (for example householder planning then building regulations; or Licence to Alter plus building control for a flat), a sense of the drawing packages involved, and either a fixed fee for the next stage or a clear list of what is needed to quote. You should not leave only with mood-board language and no sequence.

If you want to self-check first, use the planning permission checker, the drawings selector, or the package finder. Tools do not replace an address review, but they frame the conversation so less time is spent on basics.

Local pages that make the brief concrete

If your project is in a specific area, read the local money page that matches the work — for example Hampstead house extensions, Highgate loft conversions, or Hampstead planning drawings. Those pages explain the local constraints we will check anyway; arriving already aware of them makes the consultation faster and more honest.