The brief almost always begins with bedrooms and bathrooms. How many, what size, where. These are the countable things, the ones that appear on estate agent listings and planning applications, the ones that translate cleanly into square footage and cost-per-metre calculations.

They are also, in our experience, almost never the most important rooms in the house.

What clients describe when they are not describing rooms — when they are talking about how they want to feel, what they want to be able to do, what they miss about a place they used to live — is almost always something else. A landing wide enough to sit on. A kitchen that doesn't make them feel like they are performing domesticity. A room with no designated use that the family can colonise differently on different days.

We call these the rooms people don't talk about. Not because they are hidden or unconscious, but because they don't have names. They don't appear on the brief because there is no word for them in the language of briefs.

Our job is to find them. To listen to what clients say about the life they want to live and to translate that — not into a list of rooms, but into a sequence of spaces that makes that life possible.

The most common thing clients say when they first walk through a finished house is not about the kitchen or the bedrooms. It is about a moment they hadn't anticipated. A window they hadn't specified. A threshold they cross every morning without thinking about it, that turns out to be the best part of the day.

We design for that moment. We just can't always tell them in advance where it will be.