Key takeaways

·       Around $5,000 per square metre is a realistic starting point for an architect designed extension in Melbourne, and more for a second storey or a high finish.

·       Independent quantity surveyor data puts architect designed residential work in Melbourne at roughly $4,700 to $6,900 per square metre including GST.

·       Kitchens, bathrooms and laundries are priced on top of the build rate.

·       Design, engineering, permits, Home Warranty insurance and a contingency sit outside the rate too.

·       The biggest saving is usually in the brief, not the build.

What does a house extension cost per square metre in Melbourne?

For an architect designed extension, around $5,000 per square metre is a realistic starting point, and more for a second storey or a high level of finish. Kitchens and bathrooms sit on top of that.

So a 40 square metre rear extension at $5,000 per square metre is $200,000 before a new kitchen or bathroom goes in.

That number is a starting point, not a quote. Two extensions of the same size can land a long way apart, and the rest of this article is about why, and which of those reasons you can control.

Why does the number matter so much, so early?

The kids are older and the house has run out of rooms. Or they have moved out and the house suddenly works against you. Or a parent is about to move in. Whatever the trigger, the question in front of you is the same: do we extend and stay, or do we sell and go?

Almost nobody can answer that without a number, and almost nobody wants to pick up the phone to get one. That is understandable. Most of the cost figures online come from builders' price lists, quoted per square metre with no explanation of what sits inside the rate or what sits outside it.

Where do the figures come from?

I would rather show my working than ask you to take a number on trust.

Treat the lower Archicentre figures with care. They describe a basic shell with good site access and a simple roof. They exclude kitchens, bathrooms, service upgrades and repairs to the existing house, which is why real budgets land higher.

What are the six things that move the cost of an extension?

#### 1. Going out or going up

A ground floor extension and a second storey are different projects, not different sizes of the same project. Archicentre flags first floor additions as costing extra, because they bring a stair, structural work to the existing house and changes to the roof. Going up can still be the right answer on a tight block, but it rarely saves money per square metre.

#### 2. Kitchens, bathrooms and laundries

Wet areas are priced on their own because they are the most expensive rooms in any house. Archicentre's 2026 guide puts them at:

·       Kitchen: $23,000 to $49,000

·       Bathroom or ensuite: $17,500 to $35,000

·       Laundry: $10,000 to $19,000

An extension that is mostly a living room and one that holds a new kitchen and ensuite can be the same size and a very different price. If the kitchen can stay where it is, that is often the single biggest saving available.

#### 3. The house you already have

The per square metre rate covers the new part. It does not cover what the new part reveals about the old part. Joining an extension to an existing house usually means some combination of upgraded electrics, new plumbing runs, heating that now has to reach further, and repairs to things nobody knew needed repairing until a wall came off. None of that is in the rate, and older houses carry more of it.

#### 4. The site

Much of Melbourne's south east sits on reactive clay. Under AS 2870, the Australian Standard for residential slabs and footings, your site is classified by how much the soil moves with moisture, and that classification sets your footing design before any visible part of the extension is priced. A sloping block, a narrow side access that limits machinery, or an easement along the boundary all add cost in the same quiet way. Council Approvals 101 covers where those site constraints meet the approvals process.

#### 5. Planning controls

If your house sits in a heritage overlay, which many period homes across the inner and middle south east do, Clause 43.01 of the planning scheme requires a planning permit for external works. That means more design time, more documentation and a longer lead time before a builder can start. It also tends to shape the answer: the original façade stays, and the new work sits behind or above it. I have written about extending a period home in more detail.

#### 6. Finish and fit out

This is the lever you control most directly. Joinery, glazing, flooring, tapware and appliances can move a project from the low end of the BMT range to the high end without changing a single wall. The useful question is not "how cheap can this be" but "where does quality matter to how we live, and where will we never notice it". What drives the cost of a custom home goes through those choices one by one, and good design on a renovation budget covers how to spend where it counts.

What sits outside the build rate?

Budget separately for:

·       Design and engineering. Architectural design, structural engineering and, depending on the site, a soil report and land survey.

·       Permits. A building permit in every case, and a planning permit where your zone, lot or an overlay requires one.

·       Home Warranty insurance. In Victoria, domestic building work valued at more than $20,000 needs Home Warranty insurance, which started on 1 July 2026.

·       A contingency. Existing houses hold surprises, and the older the house, the more of them.

For a line by line view of where the money goes, Budgeting your Melbourne build sets it out.

Where do extension budgets usually go wrong?

Rarely on the headline rate. Usually in the order things happen, and in the gap between the brief you started with and the one you needed.

In October 2026, 229 public forum posts and reviews written by Australian homeowners planning an extension or renovation were read and sorted for this practice. Almost a third of their complaints (45 of 139) were about cost, and the most bitter were from people who paid for a design, and sometimes permits, before anyone told them what it would cost to build. The quotes came back far over budget and the process started again.

The other gap is the brief. "We need a bigger kitchen" is very often "we cannot have people over without one of us stuck alone at the sink." The first answer is a rear extension with a new kitchen in it. The second is sometimes a wall moved and a bench turned around, at a fraction of the cost. Getting the brief right before anything is drawn is the cheapest decision in the whole project.

Should you extend at all?

Sometimes the honest answer to "what will the extension cost" is "more than moving would". Stamp duty, agents' fees and moving costs are real, but so is the extension, and the right answer depends on your house, your block and how long you plan to stay. Extending vs moving lays out the full list of costs on both sides, and the renovate or relocate calculator gives you a first read in a few minutes.

Frequently asked questions

How much does a house extension cost per square metre in Melbourne?

For architect designed work, around $5,000 per square metre is a realistic starting point. Independent quantity surveyor data puts architect designed residential work in Melbourne at roughly $4,700 to $6,900 per square metre including GST, before kitchens and bathrooms.

Is it cheaper to build up or out?

Per square metre, going out is usually cheaper. A second storey brings a stair, structural work to the existing house and roof changes, which Archicentre flags as extra cost. On a small block, going up can still be the better use of the land.

Do I need a planning permit for a house extension in Melbourne?

You always need a building permit. Whether you also need a planning permit depends on your zone, the size of your lot and whether an overlay applies. A heritage overlay requires a planning permit for external works.

How can I find out what my extension will cost before paying for drawings?

A feasibility study tests your brief against your block, the planning controls and a realistic cost estimate before design starts. You find out whether your brief and your budget fit while changing your mind is still cheap.

Next step

Every figure in this article is a range, because every house is different. The only way to replace a range with a number is to look at your house, your block and your brief together.

That is what the Feasibility Study is for: three working sessions and a cost estimate, for a fixed fee, so you know what your extension will cost before you pay for drawings. You finish knowing what your site allows, what your brief would cost to build, and whether extending or moving is the better decision for your household.

Book a Feasibility Study

Cost figures: BMT Construction Cost Table 2026 and Archicentre Australia Cost Guide 2026. General guidance only; your project will be priced on its own merits.

Mark MacInnis is a Melbourne architect based in the city's south east, working with homeowners across Brighton, Malvern East, North Melbourne and the surrounding suburbs on renovations, extensions and dual occupancy projects. His work has been featured in The Age and Best Houses Australia.

So a 40 square metre rear extension at $5,000 per square metre is $200,000 before a new kitchen or bathroom goes in.

That number is a starting point, not a quote. The rest of this article is about why two extensions of the same size can land a long way apart, and which of those reasons you can control.

Why the number matters more than the design, at first

The kids are older and the house has run out of rooms. Or they have moved out and the house suddenly works against you. Or a parent is about to move in. Whatever the trigger, the question in front of you is the same: do we extend and stay, or do we sell and go?

Almost nobody can answer that without a number, and almost nobody wants to pick up the phone to get one. That is understandable. Most of the cost figures online come from builders’ price lists, quoted per square metre with no explanation of what sits inside the rate or what sits outside it.

Here is what sits inside it, what sits outside it, and the six things that move it.

Where the figures come from

I would rather show my working than ask you to take a number on trust.

Source

What it measures

Rate per square metre

BMT Construction Cost Table 2026 (quantity surveyors)

Architecturally designed residence, low to medium finish

$4,645 to $5,947, excluding GST, Sydney base. BMT adjusts Melbourne to 92% to 105% of Sydney, which with GST is roughly $4,700 to $6,900

Archicentre Australia Cost Guide 2026

New construction including extensions, shell and roof only

$2,700 to $5,100, including GST

Treat the lower Archicentre figures with care. They describe a basic shell with good site access and a simple roof. They exclude kitchens, bathrooms, service upgrades and repairs to the existing house, which is why real budgets land higher.

The six things that move the number

1. Going out or going up

A ground floor extension and a second storey are different projects, not different sizes of the same project. Archicentre flags first floor additions as costing extra, because they bring a stair, structural work to the existing house and changes to the roof. Going up can still be the right answer on a tight block, but it rarely saves money per square metre.

2. Kitchens, bathrooms and laundries

Wet areas are priced on their own because they are the most expensive rooms in any house. Archicentre’s 2026 guide puts them at:

•          Kitchen: $23,000 to $49,000

•          Bathroom or ensuite: $17,500 to $35,000

•          Laundry: $10,000 to $19,000

An extension that is mostly a living room and one that holds a new kitchen and ensuite can be the same size and a very different price. If the kitchen can stay where it is, that is often the single biggest saving available.

3. The house you already have

The per square metre rate covers the new part. It does not cover what the new part reveals about the old part. Joining an extension to an existing house usually means some combination of upgraded electrics, new plumbing runs, heating that now has to reach further, and repairs to things nobody knew needed repairing until a wall came off. None of that is in the rate, and older houses carry more of it.

4. The site

Much of Melbourne’s south east sits on reactive clay. Under AS 2870, the Australian Standard for residential slabs and footings, your site is classified by how much the soil moves with moisture, and that classification sets your footing design before any visible part of the extension is priced. A sloping block, a narrow side access that limits machinery, or an easement along the boundary all add cost in the same quiet way. Council Approvals 101 covers where those site constraints meet the approvals process.

5. Planning controls

If your house sits in a heritage overlay, which many period homes across the inner and middle south east do, Clause 43.01 of the planning scheme requires a planning permit for external works. That means more design time, more documentation and a longer lead time before a builder can start. It also tends to shape the answer: the original façade stays, and the new work sits behind or above it. I have written about extending a period home in more detail.

6. Finish and fit out

This is the lever you control most directly. Joinery, glazing, flooring, tapware and appliances can move a project from the low end of the BMT range to the high end without changing a single wall. The useful question is not “how cheap can this be” but “where does quality matter to how we live, and where will we never notice it”. What drives the cost of a custom home goes through those choices one by one, and good design on a renovation budget covers how to spend where it counts.

The costs that sit outside the build rate

Budget separately for:

•          Design and engineering. Architectural design, structural engineering and, depending on the site, a soil report and land survey.

•          Permits. A building permit in every case, and a planning permit where your zone, lot or an overlay requires one.

•          Home Warranty insurance. In Victoria, domestic building work over $20,000 needs Home Warranty insurance, which replaced domestic building insurance on 1 July 2026.

•          A contingency. Existing houses hold surprises, and the older the house, the more of them.

For a line by line view of where the money goes, Budgeting your Melbourne build sets it out.

Where budgets usually go wrong

Rarely on the headline rate. Usually in the gap between the brief you started with and the one you needed.

“We need a bigger kitchen” is very often “we cannot have people over without one of us stuck alone at the sink.” The first answer is a rear extension with a new kitchen in it. The second is sometimes a wall moved and a bench turned around, at a fraction of the cost. Getting the brief right before anything is drawn is the cheapest decision in the whole project.

[MARK TO ADD: two or three sentences in his own words on which of the six drivers most often catches his clients out, with one real example, suburb only, no client name or figures. Delete this line if not supplied.]

Should you extend at all?

Sometimes the honest answer to “what will the extension cost” is “more than moving would”. Stamp duty, agents’ fees and moving costs are real, but so is the extension, and the right answer depends on your house, your block and how long you plan to stay. Extending vs moving lays out the full list of costs on both sides, and the renovate or relocate calculator will give you a first read in about ten minutes.

Frequently asked questions

How much does a house extension cost per square metre in Melbourne? For architect-designed work, around $5,000 per square metre is a realistic starting point. Independent quantity surveyor data puts architect-designed residential work in Melbourne at roughly $4,700 to $6,900 per square metre including GST, before kitchens and bathrooms.

Is it cheaper to build up or out? Per square metre, going out is usually cheaper. A second storey brings a stair, structural work to the existing house and roof changes, which Archicentre flags as extra cost. On a small block, going up can still be the better use of the land.

Do I need a planning permit for a house extension in Melbourne? You always need a building permit. Whether you also need a planning permit depends on your zone, the size of your lot and whether an overlay applies. A heritage overlay requires a planning permit for external works. Your council or architect can confirm which apply to your address.

Your number, for your house

Every figure in this article is a range, because every house is different. The only way to replace a range with a number is to look at your house, your block and your brief together.

That is what the feasibility study is for. Three working sessions and a cost estimate, so you finish knowing what your site allows, what your brief would cost to build, and whether extending or moving is the better decision for your household. It is a fixed fee, and it is the smallest commitment that still gets you a real answer. Here is what happens across those three meetings.

Book a feasibility consultation

Cost figures: BMT Construction Cost Table 2026 and Archicentre Australia Cost Guide 2026. General guidance only; your project will be priced on its own merits.

You have reached the point where a straight-walled box no longer feels like enough. The kids have moved out, or you are planning the home you want to stay in for the next twenty years, and you have started wondering about something more considered. A curve. A skylight that does real work. A room that is shaped around how you live rather than around a rectangle.

Then the practical questions arrive. Can that actually be built? What does it look like halfway through? And what does it do to the budget?

These photos are from a home I designed that is still under construction. I am sharing them unfinished on purpose. A build site is where a design gets tested, and it is the most honest place to answer those questions.

Sculptural forms, connecting with the landscape

The house sits on a slope, and the design works with the fall of the land rather than against it. In the photos you can still see scaffolding, bare ground and stone being set into the hillside, so the landscaping has not caught up yet. What is already clear is the way the building steps and curves down the block, and the way the glazing is turned toward the outlook.

If you are weighing a sloping or awkward site, this is the part worth noticing. A steep block is often seen as a problem to fix. Handled well, it is the reason the house ends up looking like it belongs there.

Sculptural concrete

At the entry, a single column flares into a sweeping, curved canopy. It is the most obvious example of a form that looks effortless in a finished photo and is anything but effortless to build. Every curve has to be set out, formed and finished by someone, and that someone needs clear drawings and a builder who is comfortable with the work.

I would rather you hear that from me before drawings start than discover it from a price afterwards. I come back to this at the end.

A sequence of sculpted interiors

Inside, a timber-lined stair rises toward a skylight, and a long hallway curves into a vaulted ceiling. The idea is a sequence rather than a collection of rooms: you move from compressed spaces into open ones, and each turn reveals something. Floors and finishes are still being protected in these photos, so you are seeing the house before the final layer goes on.

Play of light

Light is the other material in this house. A round skylight sits in a sculpted timber ceiling, with a band of high windows below it, so the daylight changes the room through the day. If this is what you are after, the thinking starts with the plan, not the lighting: I wrote about how natural light should shape your floor plan if you want the practical version.

A round wine room, inspired by the Pantheon

The wine room is circular, with a single round opening at the top and an edge of warm light around the dome. The idea came from the Pantheon in Rome. The same round opening appears in the skylight set into the timber ceiling, which is deliberate: a small number of ideas, repeated with care, make a house feel calm rather than busy.

What this means for your own project

This is one house, and it sits at the ambitious end of what I do. Your home may be quieter, and that is a perfectly good outcome. I would rather design something considered that fits how you live than something that simply looks dramatic.

What carries across to any project is the order of the questions:

1.     Start with how you live now, and how you want to live next. The form follows from that. I explain how the first conversation works in what to expect and what to bring to your first meeting with an architect.

2.     Find out what the shape will cost before you pay for drawings. Curves, large openings and custom joinery are priced differently to straight walls and standard windows. What drives the cost of a custom home sets out which decisions move the number and which you can control.

3.     Check whether the site wants an extension or a move. If you are not sure, the renovate or move calculatorcompares the two, including stamp duty.

I work as a solo practice with a network of engineers, builders and trades, so you deal with me from the first idea to the last detail. You can see the services I offer and more of the portfolio on the website.

Know the number before you draw

The step that removes the unknown is the Feasibility Study. We spend three sessions working out what the site allows, what you actually need and what it is likely to cost, so you can decide with real information. What happens in a Feasibility Study walks through each meeting.

If you are planning a home and want to talk it through, book a Feasibility Study.

How do you know what your extension will cost before you pay for drawings?

You can know what your extension will cost before anyone draws it. A feasibility study puts your brief, your block and a realistic cost estimate side by side in three meetings, for a fixed fee. You only pay for drawings once you know the project makes sense.

Key takeaways

·       Most extension budgets go wrong before design starts, when the brief and the budget have never been tested against each other.

·       A feasibility study is three working sessions and a cost estimate, for a fixed fee.

·       You leave knowing what your block allows, a realistic cost range for your brief, and whether the project makes sense.

·       It is not a commitment to the full project.

·       If the numbers do not work, you find out for the price of three meetings, not a full set of plans.

Why do so many extension budgets go wrong before the build starts?

Because the design usually comes first and the price comes last.

The common sequence goes like this. You find someone to draw the extension. You pay for concept plans, then working drawings, sometimes a planning permit. Then the drawings go to builders, and the quotes come back far higher than the number you had in your head. By then you have spent months and a real amount of money on a house you cannot afford to build, and you either start again or walk away.

In October 2026, 229 public forum posts and reviews written by Australian homeowners planning an extension or renovation were read and sorted for this practice. Almost a third of their complaints (45 of 139) were about cost. The most bitter were from people who had paid for a design, and sometimes permits as well, before anyone told them what it would cost to build. The next most common complaint was not knowing who to call first.

A feasibility study reverses the order. The cost question gets answered first, while changing your mind is still cheap.

What is a feasibility study?

A feasibility study is a short, fixed fee piece of work done before any design starts. It tests what you want against your block, the planning controls that apply to it, and a realistic cost estimate, so you can decide whether to go ahead, and in what form, with real information.

Why I start here, before any design work

A lot of architects will happily sketch you a beautiful concept in a first meeting. I don't, and it's not because I can't. It's because a concept drawn before I understand your household, your block and your budget isn't really designed for you yet. It's a guess dressed up as a plan, and guesses are expensive to fall in love with.

A feasibility study exists to replace the guessing with actual information, before you've committed to anything beyond the study itself. It's a fixed cost, a fixed number of meetings, and a useful outcome regardless of what you decide afterwards.

What happens in the three meetings?

Meeting one: I listen. This is a workshop session, and it's less like an interview and more like an open conversation about how your household actually lives. Not a wish list of finishes, but a real picture of your normal Tuesday and your normal Sunday, who's home when, what's frustrating about the current layout, and what the next chapter of life in this home needs to look like. I ask a lot of questions and do very little talking. This is also where we talk about your budget openly, along with the things people are usually anxious to ask but haven't yet: roughly what something like this costs, roughly how long it takes, and what the next steps would be.

Meeting two: I bring back what I've found. Between the first and second meeting, I look properly at your block, its orientation and constraints, any council overlay requirements, and structural questions if you're weighing renovating against rebuilding. Then I test what's possible against what you told me you need, and against what you told me you want to spend. The second meeting is where I share that thinking, not as a finished design, but as a realistic sense of what your site can support and roughly what it would take to get there.

Meeting three: we land on a direction and a number. By the third meeting we're narrowing rather than exploring. This is where the realistic scope, and the realistic cost range that goes with it, comes into focus. You leave knowing what's possible on your block, what it would likely cost, and whether the project as you're imagining it makes sense, or whether the brief needs to shift before anyone draws a line.

What do you walk away with?

At the end of the three meetings you have:

·       a clear understanding of what your block can support

·       a realistic cost range tied to your actual brief, not a generic per square metre figure

·       an honest view on whether the brief and the budget fit, and what would need to change if they don't

·       enough information to decide your next step

Some households go straight into design. Some take the findings away and sit with them. Some decide, having seen the real picture, that this isn't the right project or the right time, and that's a legitimate outcome too. I'd rather you make that call with real information than commit further on a guess.

Is the cost estimate the same as a builder's quote?

No. A builder can only price a finished set of drawings. The cost range from a feasibility study comes earlier, and it does a different job: it tells you, before you spend on drawings, whether your brief and your budget are in the same place. If they aren't, that's the cheapest possible moment to find out. If you want to understand where the money goes in the meantime, Budgeting your Melbourne build and what drives the cost of a custom home go through it in detail.

What a feasibility study is not

It's not a sales pitch dressed up as a consultation. It's not a commitment to hire me for the full project, though most households who complete it do continue, because by that point we've already started working well together and you have a real basis for the decision. And it's not a generic questionnaire. Every feasibility study is shaped around your household and your block, because that's the whole point of doing it before the design starts, not after.

Why this matters more than it might seem

Committing to an architect for a renovation or extension is a relationship decision, not just a purchasing one. You're agreeing to work closely with one person for what's often four months to well over a year. The feasibility study lets you make that call properly: you see how I work, how I listen and how I think through a problem before you're committed to the bigger engagement. If it's not the right fit, three meetings is a much smaller thing to have tried than a full design commitment. If you'd like to know more about how that first conversation runs, here's what to expect at a first meeting with an architect.

Frequently asked questions

What is a feasibility study for a house extension?

It is a short, fixed fee piece of work done before design starts. It tests your brief against your block, the planning controls and a realistic cost estimate, so you can decide whether and how to go ahead.

How is a feasibility study different from a builder's quote?

A builder can only price a finished set of drawings. A feasibility study gives you a realistic cost range earlier, before you pay for drawings, so you know whether your brief and your budget fit.

Do I have to use the same architect for the design afterwards?

No. A feasibility study is not a commitment to the full project. Most households who complete one do continue, but you decide with the findings in hand.

Can a feasibility study tell me whether to extend or move?

It gives you the information that decision depends on: what your block allows and what your brief would cost to build. You can then weigh that against the cost of selling and buying.

Next step

If you already have a project in mind, the layout that no longer fits, the tired house with good bones, the question of whether to extend or move, the feasibility study is where it starts to become concrete.

Book a Feasibility Study

Not ready to talk yet? The renovate or relocate calculator gives you a first read on extending versus moving, and you can walk through your own home in 3D before anyone draws it.

Mark MacInnis is a Melbourne architect based in the city's south-east, working with homeowners across Brighton, Malvern East, North Melbourne and the surrounding suburbs on renovations, extensions and dual-occupancy projects. His work has been featured in The Age and Best Houses Australia.

Key takeaways

·       A retreat is a design outcome, not a decorating style. Layout, thresholds, light and materials set it.

·       Compression and release, a low or narrow space opening into a larger and brighter one, makes rooms feel calmer and bigger.

·       Screens, routers and control panels can be planned out of sight, but only if power and data are located before the walls close.

·       Open shelving should be a choice, not a default. Planned storage is what keeps a calm house calm.

·       The cheapest time to design for calm is before drawings are final, which is what a feasibility study is for.

The house used to work. Then the kids got older, or moved out, or one of you started working from the spare room. Now there is a charger on every bench, the TV is the first thing you see when you walk in, and nowhere in the house feels like somewhere to escape to.

Often the problem is not size. It is that the house was never designed to slow you down. The good news is that calm is not a mood you buy in a homewares store. It is something an architect can design into the bones of a renovation.

What makes a home feel like a retreat?

A retreat home is one where the building itself lowers the pace. You arrive through a considered threshold, the main rooms open up around you, technology sits out of sight, and natural materials and changing light do the work that decoration usually tries to do. It is not a style. A Victorian terrace with a modern rear extension in Malvern can feel like a retreat. So can a new build in Carnegie.

Why does the way you arrive matter so much?

Because the entry sets the pace for everything after it. Architects call one of the oldest tools for this compression and release: a lower, narrower or dimmer space that opens into a larger, brighter one. The contrast makes the second room feel bigger and calmer than its measurements suggest. Frank Lloyd Wright made it a signature of his entries, with low foyers opening into generous living rooms.

In a renovation this is often already half there. In a period home, the original hallway is the compression and the new rear living space is the release. The design job is to protect that moment rather than knock it out for a wider corridor. The front door itself is part of the sequence too: what you see first, and what you do not, shapes how the whole house feels.

Where should the technology go?

Out of the line of sight, and planned from day one. A calm room is one where the materials, the view and the people are what you notice, not the screen. That means deciding early where the TV lives (in joinery with doors, recessed into a wall, or in its own smaller room), where devices charge, where the modem and router sit, and where thermostats and control panels go.

These decisions depend on power and data points, which are set before plasterboard goes up. Moving them later means opening walls. It is also a good reason to keep at least one room with a door. If the living space is fully open, there is nowhere to put the noise. Open plan or defined spaces is worth deciding deliberately, not by habit.

Should a calm home have open shelving?

Only where you have chosen it. Open shelving is lovely when it holds a few things you care about and hard work when it becomes the place everything lands. A calm house usually has more closed storage than people expect, planned around what you actually own, with display kept for the pieces that earn it. Even an empty shelf or a bare wall can be part of the design. There is more on getting the balance right in shelving that works.

Doors matter here too. A pocket door can close off a study or a scullery so the mess of daily life disappears when you want it to.

Which materials make a space feel calm?

Fewer materials, used with care. Timber, stone, render and textured surfaces add warmth and weight, and they age in a way that feels settled rather than tired. The quality shows most where two materials meet: a clean junction between timber and plaster, a shadow line where a wall meets the ceiling. Those details are small on paper and very noticeable in the room.

How does light change the feel of a room?

A room that changes through the day feels alive without feeling busy. Morning light in the kitchen, softer light in the living room by evening, a skylight that tracks the sun down a hallway. That comes from orientation, window placement and roof form, all decided at design stage. How natural light should shape your floor plan goes deeper on this, and designing for Melbourne's climate covers how to get the light without the heat.

Can you get this in a renovation, or only a new build?

You can get it in a renovation, and often more cheaply than people assume, because calm comes mostly from decisions rather than floor area. Rethinking the sequence of rooms, planning storage and technology properly, and opening the back of the house to the right light can change how an existing home feels without starting again. If you are still weighing up whether to stay at all, renovate or relocate is the place to start.

What should you bring to the first conversation?

Not a mood board. Bring answers to three questions:

·       Which room frustrates you most, and at what time of day?

·       Where do you go now when you want quiet, and why there?

·       What technology do you live with, and what would you hide if you could?

Those answers tell an architect more about what calm means for your household than any photo. There is more on preparing in your first meeting with an architect.

Frequently asked questions

What is compression and release in architecture?

Compression and release is a design technique where a lower, narrower or darker space leads into a larger, brighter one. The contrast makes the second room feel bigger and calmer than its measurements suggest. Frank Lloyd Wright made it a signature of his entries.

Can an existing home be renovated to feel more like a retreat?

Yes. Most of what makes a home feel calm comes from the sequence of rooms, where the technology goes, how storage is planned and how light enters. All of those can be reworked in a renovation or extension, and a period home's original hallway often becomes the natural threshold into a new living space.

How do you hide a TV in a living room?

Plan it into joinery with doors or sliding panels, recess it into a wall, or give it its own smaller room so the main living space is not built around a screen. Power and data points need to be located at design stage, before walls are closed in.

Does a calm, retreat-style home cost more to build?

Not necessarily. Calm comes mostly from decisions made early about layout, storage and light, not from extra floor area or expensive finishes. Every project's cost is different, which is why a feasibility study with a cost estimate comes before any drawings are finalised.

Next step: start with a feasibility study

A home that feels considered starts with being listened to. My feasibility study is three sessions and a cost estimate: we work out what calm looks like for how you live now, test it against your site and budget, and you leave knowing what it will cost before anything is drawn. See how my services work or get in touch to book.

Your kids have moved out, or a parent is about to move in, or the family has outgrown a house you have loved for fifteen years. The place that once worked has stopped working.

So you did what most people now do first. You opened an AI tool, described the house you wish you had, and less than a minute later you were looking at an image of a kitchen opening onto a north facing deck, with morning light falling exactly where you wanted it.

That was a useful evening. It was not a plan.

If you came to this page expecting an architect to tell you these tools are rubbish, you will be disappointed. They are not. They are genuinely good at some things, and they have changed the first few weeks of a renovation project for the better. What they do not do is the part that determines whether your project gets approved, gets built, and costs what you expected.

Here is the honest version of both.

What AI is actually good at

Giving you vocabulary. Most people know what they dislike about their house long before they can describe what they want instead. Generating twenty variations is a fast way to find the words for it.

Getting a household to the same starting point. Two people can argue about "open plan" for a decade and mean completely different things by it. Looking at the same image is a shortcut through that.

Testing a feeling cheaply. Wondering what the room would be like with the ceiling lifted at one end? You can see a version of that in seconds rather than waiting for a sketch.

Asking better questions. Used as a research tool rather than a design tool, it is useful. More on that below.

None of this is trivial. Clients who arrive with a folder of AI images alongside a few pages torn out of the lookbooks are usually easier to work with, because they have already done the hard work of noticing what moves them.

What the image does not know

1. Your site

An AI render assumes a flat, empty, generic block. Yours is not.

Much of Melbourne's south eastern suburb belt sits on reactive clay. Under AS 2870, the Australian Standard for residential slabs and footings, a site is physically classified from A through to P based on how much the soil moves with moisture. That classification drives your footing design, and footing design drives a meaningful slice of your budget before you have chosen a single tap. A soil test is a physical act performed on your actual land by a person with a drill rig. No model can do it from a description.

The same goes for the fall across your block, where the sewer branch runs, and what is buried along your boundary. If there is an easement or a water authority asset near your proposed extension, that is not a detail to sort out later. Melbourne Water is explicit that a council or building surveyor cannot issue a building permit for work near its assets without written approval first. An AI does not know there is a drainage easement down your side boundary. Your title does.

2. The rules, which are local, and which move

This is the failure mode almost nobody anticipates, because the tool never flags it.

Two examples from the last eighteen months in Victoria:

• On 8 September 2025, Clause 54 of every Victorian planning scheme changed under Amendment VC282, introducing new residential development standards and a deemed to comply assessment pathway for single dwellings.

• On 1 July 2026, domestic building insurance in Victoria was replaced by the Home Warranty scheme, administered by the Building and Plumbing Commission, with the threshold for eligible work lifting from $16,000 to $20,000.

A model trained before those dates will answer questions about both with total confidence, and it will be wrong. It will not tell you it is out of date, because it does not know that it is.

Then there is the local layer on top. If your property sits in a heritage overlay, which a great many period homes across the inner and middle south east do, demolition and works you would reasonably assume are routine require a planning permit, assessed against the specific heritage citation for your area. Two houses on the same street can sit under different controls. Navigating that is the whole point of the permits and plans stage, and it is where a project either moves or stalls.

3. Whether it can be built, and for what

Anyone can draw a nine metre unsupported span. Someone has to price the steel that holds it up, and someone has to work out how that steel gets into a backyard with a 900mm side access.

The gap between a design that looks buildable and a design a builder will price without loading it with contingency is where renovation budgets quietly disappear. Buildability is not an aesthetic judgement. It is the accumulated knowledge of what trades charge for, what councils query, and which clever detail will cost you three weeks and a five figure sum to resolve on site. You can see how that resolves in practice across the completed projects, where the interesting decisions are usually the ones you would never notice.

4. Who is accountable

In Victoria, you cannot represent yourself as an architect or provide architectural services unless you are registered with the Architects Registration Board of Victoria under the Architects Act 1991. Companies and partnerships providing architectural services must be approved by the ARBV as well.

That registration exists so there is a person, with professional indemnity and a licence at risk, standing behind the drawings. An AI output has nobody behind it. When something is missed, the cost of the miss lands on you.

5. The brief itself

This is the largest one, and the least technical.

The part that is not technical at all

The brief you arrive with is usually not the brief you need.

"We need a bigger kitchen" is very often "we cannot have people over without one of us being stranded alone at the sink." Those are different problems. The first has an expensive answer involving a rear extension. The second sometimes has a much cheaper one involving moving a wall and reorienting a bench. The only way to find out which you have is to ask, and then to keep asking.

An AI tool will take your first sentence at face value and design exactly what you asked for. That is the whole problem. It is very good at answering the question. It has no reason to interrogate whether it is the right question.

Two people in a household rarely want the same thing, and they rarely say so directly.

A good deal of early design work is listening to the same room described in two slightly different ways by two people who live in it, noticing where those descriptions diverge, and finding the design that gives both of them what they actually meant. That is a conversation, and it takes more than one sitting. It is why the feasibility study runs across three sessions rather than one.

Knowing what to leave out.

Generative tools are additive by nature. Ask for more and you get more. A considered design is mostly a sequence of decisions about what not to do, and those decisions are the hardest to make alone, because every one of them feels like a loss until you see the result.

Judgement when the number comes back.

At some point a builder returns a price and it is higher than you hoped. The value in that moment is not more options. It is someone who has been through this many times telling you which three things to protect because they are the reason the project works, and which six to let go because you will not notice them in a year. That is experience under constraint, and it is the opposite of a generation problem.

Advocating for you.

With council, with the building surveyor, with the engineer, with the builder. Someone has to make the case for your design and hold the line on it across four months to more than a year. That is what the project management stage actually buys you, and the relationship is as much the service as the drawings are.

What to actually do with your AI images

Do not throw them out. They are useful. Use them properly.

1. Keep every one you liked and bring them to your first meeting. They are evidence of taste, which is hard to describe and easy to show.

2. Annotate why. "This one, because of the light coming across the bench" tells an architect something. "This one" tells them almost nothing.

3. Do the same for the ones you hated. Knowing what to avoid narrows a design faster than knowing what to chase.

4. Do not brief from a render's dimensions or materials. They are decorative, not derived from anything. Treat the image as a feeling, not a specification.

5. Use the tool for questions, not answers. "What are the common ways people bring light into a south facing living room in a period home?" is a genuinely good prompt. "Design my living room" is not.

So, do you still need an architect?

Not for everything, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

If you are doing a like for like bathroom, a deck, or a straightforward internal refresh with no structural change, a good builder and a competent draftsperson may be exactly the right call, and cheaper.

Where an architect earns the fee is where the variables multiply:

• A period or heritage home where the façade needs to stay and the new work has to sit behind or above it

• Anything that changes the structure, the roof line, or the orientation of how the house is used

• Tight, sloping, or awkwardly oriented sites where the constraint is the design problem

• Dual occupancy and subdivision, where planning drives everything

• Any project where the real question is still whether to extend or to move

That last one matters most, because it is the question underneath almost every enquiry. An AI tool will happily design an extension for you. It will never ask whether you should be building one at all. If that is where you are, the renovate or relocate calculator is a better first ten minutes than another render.

The next step, and what it costs

The reason most people put off the phone call is not the design. It is not knowing what the whole thing costs, and not wanting to find out in a way that commits them to anything.

That is what a feasibility study is for. Three working sessions and a cost estimate, so you finish with a realistic picture of what your site allows, what your brief would cost to build, and whether extending or relocating is the better decision for your household. It is a fixed fee, and it is deliberately the smallest possible commitment that still gives you a real answer. The full outline of how it works is on the services page.

Bring your AI images. They are a good place to start the conversation.

Book a feasibility consultation

There's a threshold in residential work where the questions change.

Below it, most of the conversation is about how to fit what a household needs inside what it can spend. Above it — somewhere past the five million mark, depending on the site — the budget stops being the tightest constraint. Something else takes its place.

That surprises people. The assumption is that a larger budget means fewer problems. What it actually means is different problems, and most of them arrive earlier than expected.

The builder becomes a design decision

At this level you are not tendering into a wide field. The pool of builders genuinely capable of delivering this kind of work — the joinery tolerances, the structural complexity, the coordination load, the client relationship over a multi-year program — is small, and the good ones are booked.

Which changes how procurement works. Competitive lowest-price tender starts to make less sense than a negotiated arrangement, or bringing a builder in early to advise on buildability and program while the design is still moving.

Choosing the builder stops being an administrative step at the end of documentation. It becomes one of the decisions the project turns on.

The consultant team grows, and coordinating it becomes the job

A straightforward renovation might involve a structural engineer, a building surveyor and a land surveyor.

A project at this scale can involve all of those plus civil and geotechnical engineers, a town planner, an arborist, a landscape architect, a lighting designer, an acoustic consultant, an AV and controls integrator, an interior designer, a quantity surveyor, and depending on the site, a bushfire consultant and a land capability assessor.

Every one of them is competent. None of them is responsible for how their work meets everyone else's. That gap is where cost and delay live, and it's the reason project management stops being optional at this level.

On larger sites, a lot of the money goes underground

If the site is large, sloping, or beyond reticulated services, a meaningful share of the budget is spent before anything appears above ground.

On-site wastewater treatment and the land capability assessment behind it. Water storage. A power supply upgrade. Stormwater management across a big catchment. Driveways and crossovers measured in tens of metres rather than metres. Geotechnical investigation and the footing design that follows it. Bushfire assessment and the construction requirements that come with a rating. Arborist reports and vegetation permits.

None of it is visible in a finished photograph. All of it is real, and it is far better understood at feasibility stage than discovered at excavation.

Lead times become a design decision

Stone from a particular quarry. Imported hardware. Large-format or high-performance glazing. A lift. Custom metalwork. Specialist finishes.

At this level, specification is not only an aesthetic decision — it's a program decision. A single item with a long lead time, specified late, can hold up a trade sequence and cost more in delay than the item itself. Which is why the specification needs to be resolved much earlier than most people expect.

Documentation is where the money is protected

Large residential projects rarely fail on the contract sum. They fail on variations.

Every decision left unresolved at contract signing becomes a variation later, priced without competitive tension, at the point of least leverage. The depth of the drawing set is therefore not a technical nicety — it is the main financial control on the project.

This is the least glamorous part of the process and by some distance the most valuable.

Back-of-house separates the good large houses from the awkward ones

Big houses need things small houses don't: plant rooms, service circulation, delivery and bin routes that don't cross the entry, genuine storage, acoustic separation between zones so a household of adults can occupy the same building without living on top of each other.

Get this wrong and you produce a house that photographs beautifully and is tiring to live in. It's usually the clearest signal of whether a large home was designed by someone who has done one before.

What it costs to run

Conditioning volume. Cleaning — including the glazing. Pool and plant maintenance. Garden. Security. Systems that need servicing.

Running cost is a design output, not a surprise that arrives after handover. It's worth putting on the table during design, when it can still be influenced.

The ceiling question, asked out loud

Every location has a level above which further spending is unlikely to be recovered on resale, and that level differs enormously between an established inner-eastern street and an acreage suburb on the city's edge.

Spending past it is a legitimate choice — plenty of people are building the last house they intend to own, and resale is genuinely not the point. But it should be a stated position, because it changes the brief. A home built to be lived in for thirty years and a home built with an eye on resale are not the same home, and the difference should be decided deliberately at the start rather than argued about at the end.

What to do next

Nothing here is a reason not to build. It's a reason to spend properly on the first stage.

A feasibility study — three sessions and a cost estimate — tests the site, the constraints and the ambition together, before design is committed. At this scale, that's not a formality. It's the cheapest risk management available.

Neither owner did anything wrong. They just made different decisions at different points — and some of those decisions carried far more weight than they looked like at the time.

Here's what actually moves the number.

The drivers you mostly can't control

The site. Slope is the big one — a fall across the block means retaining, deeper footings, more excavation and often crane or truck access problems. Then soil classification, which is discovered by testing rather than chosen. Then access: a narrow frontage or a tight corner adds cost to every single delivery for the length of the build.

Services. Where the sewer, water, power and stormwater actually sit, and what has to happen if they're not where you'd want them.

The planning path. Overlays, neighbourhood character controls, heritage, vegetation protection. These don't only add report costs — they add time, and time has a cost of its own.

Market conditions. Trade availability and material pricing at the moment you go to tender. Nobody controls this. It's why a cost estimate has a date on it.

You can't change these. You can find out about them early, which is a different and very valuable thing.

The drivers you can control

Floor area. Still the single most powerful lever. Every additional square metre carries structure, roof, finishes and services. The most effective cost reduction in residential architecture is almost always a well-designed smaller plan rather than a cheaper large one.

Wet areas. Bathrooms, kitchens and laundries cost several times what a bedroom costs per square metre. The number of them, and how far apart they are, matters.

Shape. A house with lots of corners, steps and projections has more external wall for the same internal floor area — more structure, more waterproofing, more junctions, more labour. Articulation is a design choice with a price on it.

Structural ambition. Long spans, cantilevers, large unsupported openings and curves are all achievable and all cost money. Sometimes they're worth it. They should be a deliberate purchase, not an accident of the sketch.

Level changes and roof complexity. Both quietly expensive, both easy to add without noticing.

Glazing. Area, size of individual panes, and performance requirements. Large single panes escalate quickly.

Finishes and joinery. The category everyone assumes is the main driver. It matters — but by the time you're choosing tiles, most of the cost is already locked.

The point most people miss

The decisions that move the number most are made in the first stage of the project, not the last.

By the time you're selecting finishes, the floor area, the shape, the structure and the site strategy are all settled. That's most of the cost, decided before anything looked like a real house.

Which is also why documentation depth matters. A well-resolved set of drawings gets you a tender you can trust. A thin set gets you a low number followed by variations — and variations are where budgets are lost, not in the original contract sum.

What to do next

A feasibility study exists for exactly this. Three sessions and a cost estimate, before the design is committed — so the expensive decisions get made with information rather than optimism.

I understand the instinct, but I want to gently reset it. Spring is not when the building starts. Spring is when the thinking starts, so that the building can happen next year without being a scramble. The families who end up happiest with the result are almost always the ones who let the front of the process breathe.

Here is the timeline most people do not see until they are inside it.

The part before the build is longer than you think

A considered home does not go from first conversation to first trade in a few weeks. There is a feasibility stage, where we work out what your block and your budget will genuinely allow. There is design, which is where the listening turns into drawings and the drawings turn into a scheme you actually recognise as your home. There is documentation and the permit process, which in most Melbourne councils takes as long as it takes regardless of how keen everyone is. Only then does a builder price it, and only then do you break ground.

None of those stages is padding. Each one is where a decision gets made properly instead of being made in a panic on site, which is the most expensive place to make it. When people tell me a renovation "blew out," the cause is usually not the building. It is that the building started before the thinking had finished.

Why spring-to-build-next-year is the comfortable version

If you start the design work now, the long, unglamorous middle happens over the quieter months, while you are still living normally. Feasibility and design through spring and early summer. Documentation and permits ticking along while the year winds down. A builder engaged and priced with a clear set of drawings, rather than a rushed brief, ready to start when the new year opens up.

That sequence also puts you in front of the right builders instead of whoever happens to be free. Good builders in Brighton and North Melbourne book out. Arriving at their door in autumn with a complete, permit-ready set of documents is a very different conversation to arriving in spring with a sketch and a hope. You get better pricing and better people when you are the organised job in the pile.

The cost of waiting for the "right time"

The most common version of waiting is waiting to feel ready. People hold off because the budget is not settled, or because they have not decided between extending and rebuilding, or because they are not sure the block can even do what they want. Those are precisely the questions the early stages exist to answer. You do not need them resolved before you start. Starting is how they get resolved.

I have written before about what a first meeting actually looks like, and it is far less daunting, and far less committing, than most people expect. If the deeper question is whether to extend or start again, that one has its own honest comparisonworth reading first.

What starting now actually asks of you

Very little, at first. An early conversation, a feasibility study to test what is realistic, and a sense of your budget range rather than a figure worked out to the dollar. From there the pace is yours. Some families move straight into design; others sit with the feasibility for a few months and come back when the timing feels right. Either way, the clock that matters, the council-and-construction clock, is already ticking in your favour rather than against you.

If building next year is even a quiet maybe, spring is the season to have the first conversation, not the season to wait through. I would be glad to walk through what your home and your block could realistically do, and what the honest timeline looks like from here.

Book an initial consult: https://www.markmacinnis.com.au/contact

Then someone opens a real estate app, sees what the next house up costs, and the room goes quiet.

That's the point where most families start comparing numbers — and where most of them compare the wrong ones.

The moving costs people forget

The purchase price is the number everyone looks at. It's not the number that decides this.

Moving in Victoria carries a stack of costs that never show up in the listing: stamp duty on the purchase, agent commission and marketing on the sale, conveyancing on both ends, building and pest inspections, removalists, and the gap between settlements. Stamp duty alone is usually the largest single cost in the exercise and it buys you nothing you can live in.

And there's a structural problem underneath it. You are selling into the same market you're buying into. If your suburb has risen, so has the one you're moving to. You are not stepping up as far as the difference between the two prices suggests.

The extension costs people forget

Extending has its own hidden list, and pretending otherwise doesn't help anyone.

Design and documentation. Planning and building permits, and any reports the council or overlays require. Construction, which is the big one. A contingency that is genuinely held, not notionally held. Somewhere to live if you can't stay in the house. Holding costs while it runs — and this is a long process, not a fast one.

There's also a ceiling. Every suburb has a price above which further spending is unlikely to come back on resale. Spending past it isn't automatically wrong — plenty of people build a forever home deliberately — but it should be a decision made on purpose, not discovered afterwards.

The question that actually decides it

Here's the honest version: this is rarely a cost comparison. Run properly, the two numbers usually land closer together than people expect.

What separates them is what the money buys.

Moving buys a different house, a different street, and a different set of compromises — because the new house will have its own. Extending buys a house shaped around how your household actually lives, in the suburb you already chose, with the school, the neighbours and the commute intact.

The real question is narrower and more useful: can this block deliver the home you want?

Sometimes it can't. Orientation, slope, an easement, a planning overlay, the setbacks, the neighbour's boundary — occasionally the honest answer is that this site will not give you what you're asking of it, and the money is better spent moving. It's better to find that out for the cost of a feasibility study than after a design is drawn.

What to do next

Start with the block, not the budget. A feasibility study tests what your site and the planning controls will genuinely allow, sets out the options, and puts a cost estimate against them — so the extend-or-move decision gets made with real numbers instead of a real estate app and a guess.

There's a particular kind of disappointment that arrives about six months after a renovation is finished. The new space is bigger. The finishes are good. And still, at four o'clock on a winter afternoon, everyone is sitting in the old part of the house.

Almost always, it's light.

Light is the one thing a floor plan can either capture or waste permanently. You can change a benchtop. You can't move a north boundary.

Start with the hours, not the rooms

The usual method is to work out how many rooms are needed, arrange them to fit the block, then add windows where walls allow. It's backwards.

The better question is: at what time of day do you use each room, and where is the sun then?

In Melbourne, north is the useful light — steady, warm through winter, and controllable with an eave or overhang. East gives you soft morning light. West gives you late afternoon glare and summer heat load, which is why a wall of west-facing glass looks wonderful in the drawing and is unusable in February. South is even and cool, and it's underrated for anything you look at closely — a study, a workshop, a laundry.

So: kitchen and main living to the north. Bedrooms east if you can, so they wake gently and stay cool. Utility, storage and circulation south. West glass kept modest and shaded.

Light comes from above as well

Two things matter more than window width, and both get value-engineered out first.

Window head height. Light travels into a room roughly in proportion to how high the top of the glass sits, not how wide it is. Raising the head height pushes daylight deeper into the plan than adding another metre of width ever will.

Ceiling height and openings above. Highlight windows, a clerestory, a considered skylight over a stair — these bring light into the middle of a plan, which is exactly where extensions tend to go dark.

The trap in a two-storey extension

Adding a first floor to a south-eastern suburbs home very often shades that home's own northern garden and the rooms behind it. The extension gains space and the original house loses the thing that made it pleasant.

It is solvable — by setting the upper floor back, by shifting it, by reshaping the roof — but only if it's caught at concept stage. After the plans are drawn, it's expensive.

What to do next

Before you brief anyone, spend a weekend paying attention. Where does the sun land at 8am, at midday, at 4pm — in winter, not summer. Which room does everyone drift to? Which one does nobody use?

That's the brief. It's more useful than a room count.

A feasibility study takes that information, tests it against your block, its orientation and what the planning controls actually allow, and gives you a considered answer with a cost estimate attached — before you commit to a design.

The reason it so often disappoints is that it gets designed for the photograph rather than the year. A wide opening onto a west-facing paved courtyard looks wonderful in a brochure. In a real February it bakes from two in the afternoon and nobody uses it. The version that works is the one designed around how Melbourne's weather actually behaves, which is to say unpredictably and from several directions.

Start with orientation and the afternoon sun

The single biggest decision is which way the outdoor space faces. North is the quiet achiever, usable across more of the year and easy to shade in summer with a well-sized eave or pergola. West is the trap, glorious for an hour and brutal for three. If the block only offers west, the design has to work harder: deeper shade, planting, something to take the sting out of the late sun. Getting this right at the plan stage costs nothing. Getting it wrong costs a room you paid for and do not use.

Design the transition, not just the opening

The magic of indoor-outdoor living is not the size of the door. It is how the threshold is handled. A level transition from inside to out, so the eye and the foot move through without a step or a lip, is what makes two spaces read as one. Continuing a material across the boundary, or lining up the ceiling and the pergola, does more for the feeling of flow than any amount of glazing. This is the craft, and it is mostly invisible when it is done well.

Plan for the days it is not perfect

Melbourne gives you the full set in a week. The spaces that get used are the ones that work in a cool change and a hot northerly, not only on the one still evening a fortnight. Shelter from wind, some shade you can adjust, a spot that stays comfortable when the temperature swings twelve degrees between lunch and dinner. Designing for the imperfect days is what turns an outdoor room from a summer showpiece into somewhere the household actually lives.

I worked on a bayside extension recently where the whole project turned on exactly this. The owners had assumed the answer was the biggest possible opening across the back of the house. What they actually needed was a smaller, better-sheltered northern courtyard and a considered transition out from the kitchen. It is used every day now, which the enormous glass wall they first pictured never would have been.

If a proper summer connection to the outside is on your list, the useful first step is a feasibility study: a fixed-cost first step that works out what your block and its orientation will genuinely support, before you commit to anything. You can see how this thinking plays out in my portfolio of extensions, and if you would like to talk it through, get in touch to book a feasibility consultation.

Mark MacInnis is a Melbourne architect based in the city's south-east, working with homeowners across Brighton, Malvern East, North Melbourne and the surrounding suburbs on renovations, extensions and dual-occupancy projects. His work has been featured in The Age and Best Houses Australia.

Most people are a little nervous before the first meeting, and I understand why. There is a sense that you are supposed to arrive with it all worked out, a clear brief, a firm budget, maybe even a picture of the finished house, and that turning up without those things marks you as not ready. I want to put that to rest, because the opposite is true. The first meeting is for working those things out, not for presenting them.

Here is what actually happens, and what is genuinely useful to bring.

What the meeting is for

The first conversation is mostly me listening. I am trying to understand how your household lives now and how that is changing. Who is home, when, and doing what. What frustrates you about the current house, and what you would never give up. I am also, quietly, getting a feel for the block and what it will and will not allow. You do not need answers to all of this. Half of my job in that first meeting is asking the questions that help you find them.

What is useful to bring

A few simple things help more than a mood board. If you have them: a copy of the title or a recent rates notice, which tells me about the land; any plans of the existing house, even rough ones; and a rough sense of your budget range, even a wide one. Beyond that, bring your frustrations rather than your solutions. "The kitchen is dark and everyone ends up in it anyway" tells me more than "we want an island bench." The problem is far more useful to me than a proposed fix, because the fix is my job.

What you do not need

You do not need a finished brief, a budget worked out to the dollar, or a style picked out. You especially do not need to have already decided between renovating and rebuilding, or which room goes where. Arriving with all of that settled can quietly make the project worse, because the best ideas usually come from questioning the assumptions rather than building on them.

What happens next

If it feels like a fit, the sensible next step is rarely a full design. It is a feasibility study: a fixed-cost first step, run over a few meetings, that works out what is genuinely possible on your block and the likely cost of building it, before you commit to a full design or a builder. It is how the homeowners I work with turn a pile of frustrations and a vague budget into a real plan, without a large leap of faith at the start.

The thing I would most like you to take from this is that starting is smaller and less daunting than it looks. You do not have to have it worked out. That is exactly what the first meeting, and the step after it, are for.

If you have been circling the idea of a project and are not sure how to begin, get in touch to book a feasibility consultationand we will start with your normal Tuesday, not a mood board.

Mark MacInnis is a Melbourne architect based in the city's south-east, working with homeowners across Brighton, Malvern East, North Melbourne and the surrounding suburbs on renovations, extensions and dual-occupancy projects. His work has been featured in The Age and Best Houses Australia.

The decision that happens before any of the visible ones

By the time most homeowners start thinking about a renovation or a build, they're picturing finishes: the kitchen, the flooring, the bathroom tiles. Understandable, because that's what you'll touch every day. But the decision that actually determines whether your home is comfortable happens earlier, and it's rarely visible in a finished photo: which way the rooms face, and how much glass sits in which walls.

Get orientation and glazing right, and a home stays warm through winter and cool through summer with comparatively little help from mechanical heating and cooling. Get it wrong, and no amount of insulation or clever gadgetry fully makes up for it. This is the part of design that determines comfort before you've chosen a single tap.

Orientation: working with the sun you actually have

Melbourne's sun sits low and useful in winter, and high and harsh in summer. A north-facing living area, properly designed, captures low winter sun deep into the room when you want the warmth, while a well-considered eave or awning blocks the high summer sun when you don't. That's the whole trick, and it's older than any technology on the market. It's also the single biggest lever in how a home performs.

I take this particularly seriously working with sites like those around Brighton, where you're often dealing with a north or west aspect toward the bay. That exposure is a genuine asset, glorious light and a real connection to the coast, but it comes with real afternoon heat gain in summer if the glazing and shading aren't designed to handle it specifically. The same block can be either the best room in the house or the one nobody sits in by 4pm, depending entirely on decisions made at the design stage, not the finishing stage.

Every block is different. A north-south rectangular block gives you the clearest run at ideal orientation. A block running east-west, or a tight infill site hemmed in by neighbours, asks harder questions, and this is exactly the kind of problem worth solving on paper before it's solved in brick.

Glazing: more than just letting light in

Glass is where a lot of design intentions either pay off or quietly fail. A few things I weigh on every project.

Which direction is the glass facing, and how much of it is there? North glass, well-shaded, is an asset. West glass, unshaded, is a liability, low afternoon sun is brutal to sit in front of and expensive to cool against, no matter how good the glass itself is.

What is the glass actually made of? Double glazing has become close to standard on considered Melbourne projects now, and for good reason. It's a meaningful upgrade in comfort near windows in both directions, less heat loss in winter, less heat gain in summer, and it takes a genuinely cold or hot pane of glass out of the room's equation entirely.

Is there real shading, or decorative shading? An eave that looks right in the elevation drawing needs to actually be sized to block high summer sun while admitting low winter sun. This is a calculation, not a guess, and it's one of the quieter details that separates a home that performs from one that just looks like it should.

Comfort as a whole-house question, not a room-by-room one

Orientation and glazing set the foundation, but a genuinely comfortable home also thinks about insulation, airtightness, and increasingly, designing for an all-electric home from the outset rather than retrofitting it later. None of these are exciting to talk about at a dinner party. All of them show up on your energy bill and in how the house actually feels to live in, which is the part that matters once the renovation photos have been taken and you're just getting on with your life in the place.

This is also where the two things I write about most, comfort and flexibility, connect. A well-oriented, well-glazed room stays useful and pleasant in every season, which means it keeps earning its place in the plan rather than becoming the room nobody sits in. Good climate design and good long-term design are, in practice, the same design.

What this means at the start of a project

If you're planning a renovation or a new build, the conversation about orientation and glazing needs to happen at the very start, alongside the conversation about how your household lives, not bolted on afterwards once the layout is fixed. It's one of the things I map out during a feasibility study: understanding your block's orientation, working out where the north light actually falls through the seasons, and designing the glazing and shading to suit, before a single wall is drawn.

It's a fixed-cost first step, three meetings including workshop sessions to understand what matters to your household, and it gives you a clear, grounded picture of what your specific site can do before you commit to anything further.

If you're standing in a home that's beautiful in the brochure sense but uncomfortable to actually live in, get in touch to book a feasibility consultation and I'll start by understanding your block, your orientation, and how the light actually moves through your day.

I want to be upfront about something before I go further: I'm not going to give you a dollar figure in this piece, and if anyone offers you a confident number before understanding your block, your brief and your household, treat it with real caution. What I can give you is the shape of the budget, so the eventual number makes sense rather than landing as a shock.

The budget has more categories than most people expect

When homeowners picture a renovation budget, they're usually picturing the build itself, the trades, the materials, the labour. That's the largest category, but it's rarely the only significant one.

Design and professional fees. Architecture, engineering, and often other consultants depending on the project's complexity. This is the thinking that determines whether the build phase goes smoothly or turns into a series of expensive on-site decisions.

Council and statutory costs. Planning and building permits, and depending on your site, potentially other approvals. These vary by council and project, and they're easy to underestimate if you haven't budgeted for them from the start.

The build itself. Structure, services, fit-out, finishes. This is genuinely the largest line item, and it's also the one with the widest range, because it depends entirely on scope, finish level, and site conditions.

Contingency. A properly budgeted project sets aside a real contingency for the unexpected, particularly on renovations of existing homes, where what's uncovered once walls come off can't be fully known until it's uncovered. Skipping this isn't saving money, it's deferring a decision about how you'll handle a surprise you haven't had yet.

The things people forget. Temporary accommodation if you can't stay in the home during works, furniture and styling once it's finished, landscaping if the build disturbs the garden. None of these are optional if they apply to your project, and none of them are usually front of mind when someone first starts imagining the outcome.

Why the range is wide, and why that's honest, not evasive

Ask five people what a renovation costs and you'll get five different answers, and that's not because anyone's being cagey. Cost depends on scope, finish level, site conditions, structural findings, and current trade and material pricing, which shifts. A architect-led project on a straightforward block with a mid-range finish level sits in a genuinely different bracket from a complex extension on a difficult site finished to a high-end standard. Both are entirely legitimate projects. They're just not the same number.

This is exactly why I'm cautious about anyone who gives you a confident figure in a first conversation, before understanding your block, your brief or your household's priorities. A real budget comes from real thinking, not a rule of thumb applied to your postcode.

How to actually get a real number

The honest process looks like this. You start with a clear sense of what you want the finished home to do for your household, which shapes the scope. That scope, tested against your specific block and its constraints, starts to define a realistic range rather than a single figure. As the design develops and decisions firm up, materials, finishes, structural approach, that range narrows toward an actual number you can plan around.

This is precisely what a feasibility study is designed to do early, before you've committed to drawings or a builder. It's a fixed-cost first step, three meetings including workshop sessions to understand what matters to your household, that gives you a realistic sense of scope and probable cost for your specific project, so you can make a genuinely informed decision about whether to proceed, adjust the brief, or hold off, before the bigger costs are on the table.

The real question isn't "what does it cost"

It's "what does it cost to get what I actually need", which is a different question entirely, and one that can't be answered honestly without understanding your household, your block and your priorities first. That's not a way of avoiding the money conversation. It's how you have it properly, instead of anchoring to a number that was never really about your project in the first place.

If not knowing the number has been the thing holding you back, get in touch to book a feasibility consultation and we'll start turning that unknown into a real, grounded picture.

Mark MacInnis is a Melbourne architect based in the city's south-east, working with homeowners across Brighton, Malvern East, North Melbourne and the surrounding suburbs on renovations, extensions and dual-occupancy projects. His work has been featured in The Age and Best Houses Australia.

But briefs do change, and they change for a reason worth paying attention to: they follow how households actually live. Sitting across the table from homeowners in Kew, Malvern, Oakleigh and Carnegie this year, I hear the same handful of things again and again. Not styles — needs. Here are the five that are shaping 2026 projects on my drawing board, and what sits behind each one.

1. Defined openness — the correction, not the backlash

The biggest shift is the one I wrote about recently: households are stepping back from the single vast open zone, without wanting to return to a corridor of closed rooms. What they're asking for is a generous shared heart to the home, with rooms around it that have real boundaries and real jobs — a place to gather and a place to be apart, in the same plan. If your open plan living area works beautifully at 6pm and badly at 10am on a work-from-home Tuesday, this theme is about you. (The full thinking is in my earlier piece on open plan versus defined spaces.)

2. The workspace that is actually a room

For years, "home office" meant a desk in the spare room or a corner of the bedroom. In 2026 briefs, it means a room — with a door, natural light, acoustic separation from the kitchen, and a position in the plan that lets one person work while the household carries on. For couples who both work from home, it increasingly means two workable positions, not one. This is no longer an extra; it has become one of the first things we test in a floor plan, because it changes where everything else sits.

3. Rooms that will change jobs

The households I work with are thinking further ahead than they used to. Parents want a plan that works when the children are eight, and still works when they're eighteen, and still works when they've left. Others are designing with older parents in mind, or adult children who boomerang home, or the possibility of a dual occupancy on the block later. The design answer isn't more rooms — it's rooms deliberately shaped so they can change jobs without another renovation: a study that can become a bedroom, a rumpus that can become a self-contained space. Flexibility has quietly become the most valuable thing you can build in.

4. Comfort you can feel in July

Melbourne winters have a way of auditing a home's design. More clients now raise comfort and running costs in the first meeting — not as a sustainability statement, but as a lived frustration: the beautiful room nobody sits in because it's cold, the heating bill that arrives like a second mortgage. Good design answers this with fundamentals rather than gadgets: orientation, glazing, insulation, and the shape and volume of the rooms themselves. It is also, increasingly, about designing for an all-electric home from the outset. I'll go deeper on this in a coming piece on designing for Melbourne's climate, because it deserves more than a paragraph.

5. Heritage in front, life out the back

Some themes are perennially Melbourne, and this one is having a strong run: keeping the character front of a period home — the brickwork, the entry, the street presence — and doing the transformative work behind it, where the household actually lives. The craft is in the junction: how the original home and the new addition meet, so each makes the other better rather than the new part apologising for itself. Done well, you keep what the street loves and gain what your family needs.

What these five have in common

None of them is a look. Every one of them is a response to how a household lives — who is home, when, doing what, and how that will change. That is why they'll still make sense in fifteen years, when this year's colour-of-the-year has been repainted twice.

Where to start

If some of these themes sound like your house — the plan that no longer fits, the office that isn't a room, the cold spots, the period front with the wrong back — the useful first step is not picking a builder or a style. It is a feasibility study: a fixed-cost look at your home, your block and how you live, that tells you what is possible and the realistic cost range before you commit to anything. It is how the homeowners I work with turn a list of frustrations into a plan.

[Book a feasibility consultation] and we'll start with your normal Tuesday, not a mood board.

Mark MacInnis is a Melbourne architect based in the city's south-east, working with homeowners across Kew, Malvern, Oakleigh, Carnegie and the surrounding suburbs on renovations, extensions and dual-occupancy projects. His work has been featured in The Age and Best Houses Australia.

The kids have moved out, and the big open living zone that once held homework, dinner and three conversations at once now feels like a hall you heat for two people. Or the family has grown, and there is nowhere in the house where one person can take a call while another practises piano. Either way, the home that used to work doesn't quite fit any more — and the first question many Oakleigh, Malvern and Carnegie homeowners bring to us is some version of this one: should we open it up, or close some of it back in?

It is a better question than it sounds, because the honest answer in 2026 is: usually both, in different places.

Why open plan had such a long run

Open plan earned its popularity. Knocking through a dark 1970s kitchen into the living room transformed thousands of Melbourne homes — more light, better connection to the garden, one generous space where the household naturally gathers. For families with young children, being able to cook while keeping an eye on the play area is not a trend, it is a daily practicality.

The limitations only show up once you live with it. Sound travels. Cooking smells travel. Heating one vast volume through a Melbourne winter costs real money. And when everyone is home at once — which, with hybrid work, is now most of the time — there is nowhere to be apart.

What's changed since the household changed

Two shifts in how we live have quietly rebalanced the argument.

The first is working from home. When one or two people take video calls most days, "a quiet spot at the dining table" stops being a workable answer. A door you can close has become one of the most requested items in the briefs we take.

The second is the life-stage moment itself. A growing family often needs zones — connected, but separable, so that a teenager's music and a parent's meeting can coexist. A household whose children have left often needs the opposite: not more space, but better-shaped space. A smaller, warmer living area used every evening, and rooms that can earn their keep as a study, a guest room, or space for adult kids who visit — rather than one large zone that no longer has a job.

Neither of these points toward pure open plan or a return to the corridor-and-six-closed-rooms house. They point toward what we'd call defined openness: a generous shared heart to the home, with rooms around it that have real boundaries and real purposes.

The questions that decide it — before any walls move

When we start a project, we don't begin with the plan. We begin by listening to how the household actually runs, because that is what decides this question. The ones that do the most work:

Who is home, and when? A house that is full from 4pm onward has different needs from one that is busiest on weekends. Map a normal Tuesday before you commit to a layout.

Where does noise come from, and where does it need not to reach? Kitchens, kids and televisions on one side of the line; calls, sleep and reading on the other. If a layout can't keep those apart, it will frustrate you regardless of how it photographs.

What does winter cost you now? Volume is expensive to heat. A well-defined room with northern light can be comfortable at a fraction of the running cost of a double-height void. In Melbourne's climate this belongs in the decision, not in the fine print.

Which rooms have no job? If a formal lounge is used twice a year, that is not an argument for demolishing it — it is an argument for giving it a job worth keeping a door for.

What will this house need in ten years? The best answer for a family of five today should not box out the household of two it may become. Flexibility — rooms that can change jobs without another renovation — is usually worth more than either openness or definition alone.

What this means for your own home

If you are standing in a house that no longer fits — too open, too closed, or simply arranged for a life you're not living any more — the useful next step is not choosing a style. It is understanding what your specific house, on your specific block, can become, and what that would actually cost.

That is exactly what a feasibility study is for. It is a fixed-cost first step: we look at your home, your block, how you live and what you want to change, and give you a clear picture of what is possible and the realistic cost range — before you commit to drawings, permits or a builder. For most of the homeowners we work with, it is the point where "should we open it up or close it in?" stops being a debate and becomes a plan.

If your home has reached that point, [book a feasibility consultation] and we'll start the way we always do — by listening.

Mark MacInnis is a Melbourne architect based in the city's south-east, working with homeowners across Kew, Malvern, Oakleigh, Carnegie and the surrounding suburbs on renovations, extensions and dual-occupancy projects. His work has been featured in The Age and Best Houses Australia.

Before most homeowners speak to an architect, they usually have a secret collection.

A few screenshots on the phone.
A Pinterest board from 2019.
A saved Instagram post of a kitchen with beautiful light.
A photo of a friend’s hallway.
A note that says, “not too modern, but not old-fashioned either.”

This is normal. It is also useful.

A good look book can help you explain what you want before you have the architectural language to describe it. It gives your architect a visual starting point for your renovation, extension or new home design.

But there is a catch.

A messy inspiration folder can confuse the brief rather than clarify it. One minute you are saving warm timber joinery, the next you are deep in black marble bathrooms and Tuscan courtyards. The algorithm has taken the wheel, and your renovation has become a mood-board octopus.

The goal is not to collect every nice image. The goal is to build a focused visual guide that helps your architect understand what you are drawn to, what you want to avoid, and what matters most in your home.

What is a home renovation look book?

A look book is a curated collection of visual ideas for your home project.

It may include:

• Exterior styles

• Kitchen ideas

• Bathroom inspiration

• Materials and finishes

• Window and door styles

• Lighting moods

• Storage ideas

• Garden connections

• Period home details

• Examples of modern extensions

• Colours, textures and materials

• Things you dislike

For a Melbourne renovation or extension, a look book is especially useful when you are trying to balance old and new. For example, you may want to keep the character of a Victorian, Edwardian or Californian bungalow home while adding a more open, light-filled living space at the rear.

That visual tension can be hard to explain in words. A look book helps.

Why your architect does not need 500 images

More images do not always make the brief clearer.

What your architect needs is not a giant digital haystack. They need the golden needles.

A useful look book should show patterns. After reviewing your selected images, it should become easier to identify what you consistently like.

For example:

• Do you keep saving rooms with high ceilings?

• Are you drawn to natural timber?

• Do you prefer soft, neutral palettes?

• Are you saving homes with strong indoor-outdoor connections?

• Do you like traditional facades with contemporary rear additions?

• Are you drawn to built-in storage and uncluttered spaces?

• Do you like homes that feel calm, warm, dramatic, minimal or layered?

The pattern matters more than any single image.

A designer or architect may not copy the image, and generally should not. Instead, they use your look book to understand the feeling, priorities and design direction behind your choices.

The best tech tools for creating a renovation look book

You do not need a complex setup. Choose one main tool and keep it organised.

1. Pinterest for broad inspiration

Pinterest is still one of the easiest tools for collecting home renovation ideas. It works well because you can create boards, save images quickly, and organise ideas by room or theme.

For renovation planning, create separate boards or sections such as:

• Exterior

• Kitchen

• Bathroom

• Living area

• Period details

• Rear extensions

• Materials

• Lighting

• Garden connection

• Things we do not want

Designers increasingly recommend treating Pinterest as an evolving archive rather than a strict shopping list. The value is in spotting repeated preferences, not copying a whole room image tile by tile.

Best for: early-stage inspiration and discovering your design patterns.
Watch out for: saving too much without editing it later.

Useful link:
https://www.pinterest.com.au/

2. Houzz for renovation and home design examples

Houzz is useful for homeowners because it is focused on homes, renovations, interiors and professionals. Houzz Australia positions itself as a place for homeowners to find inspiration and professionals for home design projects.

You can use Houzz to save ideas into ideabooks, browse renovation examples, and look at how different rooms or exterior styles are handled.

Best for: real-world renovation references and room-by-room ideas.
Watch out for: international examples that may not translate neatly to Melbourne planning, climate, block size or construction costs.

Useful link:
https://www.houzz.com.au/

3. Canva for a simple visual look book

Canva is a good option if you want something more polished and easier to share. Canva offers mood board and whiteboard templates, which can be useful for grouping ideas visually and collaborating in real time.

You can create pages such as:

• Overall style direction

• Exterior inspiration

• Kitchen ideas

• Bathroom ideas

• Materials palette

• Lighting mood

• Must-haves

• Avoid list

This can become a simple PDF to share before your initial design consultation.

Best for: turning scattered inspiration into a clean presentation.
Watch out for: making it too pretty and not practical enough. The architect needs meaning, not a wedding invitation for your benchtop.

Useful link:
https://www.canva.com/create/mood-boards/

4. Milanote for a more flexible design board

Milanote is built for visual planning and mood boards. It allows you to add images, notes, links, videos, PDFs, colour swatches and other files into a flexible workspace.

This can work well if you want to combine inspiration with comments, such as:

• “We like the warmth of this timber.”

• “This kitchen feels too stark.”

• “Love the light, not the colour.”

• “This is close to the feeling we want.”

• “We want the extension to feel modern but not cold.”

Those comments are extremely valuable. Without them, your architect may not know whether you saved the image for the windows, the flooring, the ceiling height or the general atmosphere.

Best for: visual thinkers who want to add notes and organise ideas spatially.
Watch out for: overbuilding the board instead of curating it.

Useful link:
https://milanote.com/product/moodboarding

5. Google Drive or Dropbox for the practical folder

Sometimes the simplest system is best.

Create a folder called:

Home Renovation Look Book

Then create subfolders:

• 01 Exterior

• 02 Kitchen

• 03 Living and dining

• 04 Bathroom

• 05 Materials

• 06 Garden and outdoor connection

• 07 Things we dislike

• 08 Existing home photos

• 09 Must-have notes

This is not glamorous, but it is easy to share. It also lets you include photos of your current home, which are often more useful than another image of a $300,000 kitchen in Copenhagen.

Best for: easy file sharing and storing your own photos.
Watch out for: dumping everything in one folder with names like IMG_4729.

Useful link:
https://drive.google.com/

6. AI tools for sorting your ideas

AI can help you summarise what you like, especially if you have collected a large batch of inspiration.

You can use an AI tool to help you:

• Group images by style

• Write a plain-English design brief

• Identify repeated preferences

• Create a list of must-haves and nice-to-haves

• Turn messy notes into a cleaner architect brief

• Compare competing design directions

For example, you might write:

“Here are my renovation notes. Summarise the design style I seem to prefer, identify any contradictions, and turn this into a brief I can discuss with my architect.”

AI is not a substitute for architectural advice. It does not understand your site, planning controls, budget, structure, orientation or the real behaviour of morning light in a Melbourne winter. But it can help tidy the thinking before your first meeting.

Best for: clarifying messy notes.
Watch out for: letting AI invent design solutions before the site has been properly understood.

How to structure your renovation look book

The best look books are simple. Aim for clarity, not volume.

Page 1: The big picture

Start with a one-page summary.

Include:

• Project type: renovation, extension, new home or second-storey addition

• Suburb or general location

• Home type: period home, townhouse, family home, apartment, etc.

• Main goal: more space, better light, improved flow, ageing in place, entertaining, growing family

• Style direction: warm, calm, refined, contemporary, traditional, layered, minimal

• Budget awareness: realistic, staged, flexible or still being explored

Example:

“We want to renovate and extend our period home in Melbourne’s south-east. We like the character of the existing facade but want the rear of the home to feel lighter, warmer and more connected to the garden. We prefer natural materials, soft colours and built-in storage. We do not want the extension to feel like a glass box.”

That is already useful.

Page 2: The existing home

Include photos of your current home.

Add:

• Front facade

• Street view

• Entry

• Main living areas

• Kitchen

• Bathroom

• Outdoor area

• Awkward spaces

• Areas with poor light

• Things you love

• Things that frustrate you

This gives the architect context before they visit or review plans.

Page 3: Exterior inspiration

For Melbourne homes, exterior inspiration is important because the relationship between old and new can define the whole project.

Include examples of:

• Facades you like

• Rear extensions

• Window styles

• Roof forms

• Materials

• Garden connections

• Fencing or entry ideas

• Heritage-sensitive details

Add notes explaining what you like.

For example:

• “Like the way the new addition sits quietly behind the original home.”

• “Love the timber warmth, but this feels too dark overall.”

• “Like the steel-framed doors, but we want something softer.”

Page 4: Interior mood

This page should capture the feeling of the home.

Include images that show:

• Natural light

• Ceiling height

• Flooring

• Wall colour

• Joinery

• Furniture mood

• Texture

• Warmth

• Openness

• Calmness or drama

Avoid making this only about furniture. Your architect is more interested in the spatial qualities behind the image.

Page 5: Kitchen and living

For many renovation projects, the kitchen, dining and living area is the emotional headquarters of the brief.

Include examples of:

• Kitchen layouts

• Island benches

• Pantry ideas

• Dining connections

• Living room flow

• Built-in joinery

• Doors to the garden

• Window seats

• Storage ideas

Add practical notes:

• “We cook most nights.”

• “We need space for teenagers.”

• “We entertain casually.”

• “We want the kitchen to connect to the garden.”

• “We do not want the sink on the island.”

These comments are gold.

Page 6: Bathrooms and utility spaces

Bathrooms, laundries and mudrooms are often where budget and function need discipline.

Include:

• Vanity styles

• Tile direction

• Lighting ideas

• Storage

• Shower preferences

• Bath or no bath

• Laundry functionality

• Powder room mood

Be clear on what is essential and what is decorative.

Page 7: Materials and finishes

This is where your look book becomes more useful.

Include:

• Timber tones

• Stone or benchtop references

• Brick

• Concrete

• Tiles

• Paint colours

• Metal finishes

• Cabinetry colours

• Textures

Try to show combinations, not just isolated pretty things.

A renovation mood board should balance inspiration images with practical materials and finishes, because the look needs to work in your actual home, not only in a saved image.

Page 8: The “not this” page

This may be the most underrated page in the entire look book.

Include examples of what you do not want.

For example:

• Too white

• Too dark

• Too glossy

• Too industrial

• Too coastal

• Too ornate

• Too cold

• Too open

• Too trendy

• Too much black steel

• Too much visible clutter

This saves time. It also prevents polite design confusion, where everyone nods while secretly imagining different houses.

A simple system: collect, sort, edit, explain

Use this four-step process.

Step 1: Collect freely

For the first stage, save everything that catches your eye.

Do not overthink it. Use Pinterest, Instagram saves, Houzz, screenshots, Canva, Milanote or a folder.

Step 2: Sort by category

Move ideas into categories:

• Exterior

• Interior mood

• Kitchen

• Bathroom

• Materials

• Storage

• Garden connection

• Avoid

This makes the collection easier to understand.

Step 3: Edit ruthlessly

After a week or two, remove anything that no longer fits.

A strong look book is curated. If you have 200 kitchen images, choose the 10 that best represent your direction.

Step 4: Add notes

For each key image, write one sentence explaining what you like.

Use this format:

“We like [specific element] because [reason].”

Example:

“We like the timber ceiling because it makes the modern extension feel warmer.”

That one sentence is more useful than the image alone.

What not to do with your look book

Do not expect your home to look exactly like the images

Most inspiration images come from different sites, climates, budgets, eras and construction contexts. They are references, not recipes.

Do not mix too many styles

A little contrast is good. Total style soup is not. If your board includes Paris apartment, Byron Bay retreat, Japanese ryokan, industrial warehouse and farmhouse kitchen, your architect may need a compass and a chair.

Do not hide the practical problems

Include the ugly bits. Poor light, bad storage, awkward bathrooms, strange additions and tired rooms are all important.

The problem areas often reveal the real brief.

Do not forget lifestyle

A home is not a showroom. Add notes about how you live.

• Do you work from home?

• Do you entertain?

• Do you have children or teenagers?

• Do you need quiet zones?

• Do you garden?

• Do you want to age in place?

• Do you have pets?

• Do you need storage for sports gear, bikes or tools?

This helps the design respond to your life, not just your taste.

A useful look book template for homeowners

Here is a simple structure you can use.

SectionWhat to includeWhy it helpsProject summaryWhat you want to achieveGives the architect the big pictureExisting homePhotos and pain pointsShows the real starting pointExterior ideasFacades, extensions, materialsHelps define the old/new relationshipInterior moodLight, texture, colours, atmosphereCommunicates the feeling you wantKitchen/livingLayouts, storage, garden connectionClarifies the heart of the homeBathroom/laundryFixtures, tiles, storage, functionKeeps practical areas focusedMaterialsTimber, stone, tile, paint, brickShows your preferred paletteAvoid listStyles and details you dislikePrevents wrong turns earlyMust-havesNon-negotiablesHelps prioritise decisionsNice-to-havesFlexible wishlist itemsSupports budget conversations

How Mark MacInnis Architect can help

A look book is a helpful starting point, but it is not the design.

The architect’s role is to translate your ideas into a home that responds to your site, your budget, your council constraints, your existing building and the way you actually live.

Mark MacInnis works with Melbourne homeowners who want thoughtful renovations, extensions and new homes. A clear look book can help make the first conversation more productive, especially when you are trying to explain a feeling that words alone cannot quite capture.

Mark can help you move from:

• “We like this kind of thing”

• to “This is the right design direction for your home, site and brief.”

That is where the real value begins.

Final thought: your look book should start the conversation, not finish it

Technology makes it easier than ever to collect renovation ideas.

But the real skill is in editing those ideas into something useful.

A good look book does not need to be perfect. It needs to be clear enough to show what you value, what you are drawn to, and how you want your home to feel.

From there, a good architect can help turn the digital scraps into a considered, liveable and buildable design.

Planning a renovation, extension or new home in Melbourne?
Book an initial consult with Mark MacInnis Architect and bring your look book, sketches, screenshots or beautifully chaotic idea-folder with you.

How much space can we add?
Can we bring more light in?
Can we keep the period character and still create a modern family home?

Then comes the less glamorous but very important question:

Will council need to approve this?

For many homeowners, “council approval” feels like a foggy paddock of forms, rules, delays and neighbour concerns. But once you understand the difference between a planning permit and a building permit, the process becomes much easier to navigate.

And, importantly, easier to design for.

First: council approval is not always one thing

When people talk about council approval, they are often referring to a planning permit.

A planning permit gives permission to use or develop land in a particular way. In Victoria, a planning permit may be required for a new home, extension, renovation or additional dwelling, and it is issued by the local council. If your project needs a planning permit, it must usually be obtained before a building permit can be issued.

A building permit is different. It relates to whether the proposed building work complies with construction, safety and technical requirements under building legislation. In simple terms, planning asks, “Is this appropriate for this site and neighbourhood?” while building asks, “Can this be built safely and correctly?”

That distinction matters because some projects need both. Some may need only a building permit. Some smaller cosmetic works may not need either, depending on the scope.

When might a Melbourne home project need planning approval?

Every site is different, but planning approval may be triggered by things such as:

• Building a new home

• Adding a significant extension

• Changing the external form of the house

• Building on a small or constrained block

• Working on a property affected by a heritage overlay

• Changing how the land is used

• Building a second dwelling or small second home

• Creating overlooking, overshadowing or neighbourhood character impacts

• Building in areas affected by special planning controls, such as vegetation, flooding, bushfire or neighbourhood character overlays

For Melbourne homeowners, overlays are often the approval trapdoor. You may look at your street and think, “Plenty of people have extended.” But your property may have a heritage, neighbourhood character or environmental overlay that changes what council needs to assess.

This is especially common in established suburbs where period homes, narrow blocks and mature streetscapes are part of the area’s value.

Planning permit vs building permit: the simple version

Here is the practical difference.

Approval typeWhat it considersWho issues itWhen it happensPlanning permitLand use, neighbourhood character, overlays, siting, amenity, heritage, overlooking and broader planning rulesLocal councilUsually before the building permitBuilding permitStructural safety, construction standards, fire safety, health, amenity and compliance with building regulationsRegistered building surveyorBefore construction starts

The key point: a planning permit does not mean you are ready to build. It means council has approved the development in planning terms. You will still generally need the building permit process before work begins.

Likewise, a building permit cannot usually override the need for a planning permit. The Victorian Building Authority notes that if a planning permit is required, it must be issued before the building permit.

Why good design helps the approval process

Council approval is not just paperwork. It is also communication.

A well-considered design can show council that the project has been properly resolved. It can explain how the home responds to the site, the street, the neighbours and the existing character of the area.

This is where an architect can add real value.

For example, on a period home renovation, the approval challenge is often not simply “can we make it bigger?” It is:

• How do we retain the character that matters from the street?

• How do we place the new work so it feels sympathetic rather than bolted on?

• How do we bring in light without creating overlooking issues?

• How do we improve liveability without overwhelming the original home?

• How do we document the proposal clearly enough that council can assess it confidently?

Good design does not guarantee approval. Councils still assess projects against planning schemes, overlays and local policies. But a thoughtful design can reduce friction, avoid obvious objections and give the application a stronger planning story.

That is the quiet magic trick: not design as decoration, but design as evidence.

The common mistakes that slow homeowners down

Many approval delays happen before the application is even lodged.

1. Designing before checking the planning controls

This is the classic expensive detour. A homeowner falls in love with a concept, then later discovers a heritage overlay, height control, setback issue or overlooking concern.

The better approach is to check the planning constraints early, before the design becomes emotionally laminated.

2. Assuming neighbours have done it, so you can too

Nearby projects can be useful references, but they are not automatic permission slips. Their sites may have different dimensions, overlays, zoning, orientation or approval conditions.

3. Treating council as the enemy

Council planners are assessing whether the proposal fits the planning rules. A clear, respectful and well-documented application usually has a better chance than one that tries to bulldoze its way through the system.

4. Underestimating documentation

Council may ask for site plans, elevations, shadow diagrams, overlooking diagrams, neighbourhood character responses, heritage information or planning reports, depending on the project.

Incomplete documentation can trigger requests for more information, which can turn a simple timeline into a slow-moving possum in the roof.

5. Ignoring the building permit stage

Planning approval is not the finish line. Structural documentation, engineering, energy requirements and building compliance still need to be resolved before construction.

How long does council approval take?

There is no universal timeline. It depends on the council, the complexity of the site, whether further information is requested, whether neighbours object, and whether the application needs revisions.

Victoria’s planning system has been undergoing reform, including changes intended to streamline some residential approvals. Planning Victoria announced updated requirements for single dwellings and small second dwellings, with changes commencing from 8 September 2025.

That said, homeowners should still avoid assuming approvals will be quick. Build time into your project plan. A calm approval process is usually the result of early preparation, not optimistic calendar sorcery.

What should you do before speaking to council?

Before lodging anything, it is worth getting clear on four things.

1. Your property controls

Check zoning and overlays. These may include heritage, neighbourhood character, vegetation, flooding or other planning constraints.

2. The real project scope

Are you renovating within the existing footprint, extending, adding a second storey, building a new home, or changing the use of part of the property?

The more the external form changes, the more likely planning questions become.

3. The design priorities

Know what matters most. More light? Better connection to the garden? Preserving the façade? Creating private parent or guest zones? Improving resale appeal?

This helps the design respond intelligently rather than becoming a wishlist wearing a roof.

4. The likely approval pathway

An architect can help identify whether your project may need a planning permit, a building permit, specialist consultant input, or early council advice.

Where Mark MacInnis Architect can help

Mark MacInnis works with Melbourne homeowners who want thoughtful renovations, extensions and new homes that respond to the site, the brief and the character of the existing home.

For many clients, the value is not just in creating a beautiful design. It is in helping shape a project that can move through the approval process with fewer surprises.

That may include:

• Reviewing the opportunities and constraints of the site

• Designing with planning controls in mind

• Preparing clear architectural documentation

• Coordinating with relevant consultants where needed

• Helping homeowners understand the difference between design ambition and approval risk

• Creating a home that feels resolved, not just approved

Final thought: approval should shape the design, not shrink it

Council approval can feel like a barrier, but it is better understood as part of the project framework.

The best homes are not created by ignoring constraints. They are created by working intelligently within them, then finding the design opportunity hiding inside.

If you are planning a renovation, extension or new home build in Melbourne, the earlier you understand the approval pathway, the better your design decisions will be.

Planning a home project in Melbourne?
Book an initial consult with Mark MacInnis Architect to discuss your site, your ideas and the best next step for your project.