Most briefs that produce disappointing plans fail the same way: they describe a feeling instead of a building.
"A warm, light-filled family home with a modern aesthetic" is a sentence every architect has read and no generator can use. It contains no site, no program, no orientation, and no relationship between rooms. There is nothing in it to solve.
The fix is not to write more. It is to write constraints.
The five things worth writing down
1. The site, with dimensions and orientation
"A 7.5 by 22 m lot, long axis north-south, street to the south." That single clause decides where the living space goes, which way the private rooms face, and where the building has to be narrow. Without it every option is guessing at the hardest constraint you have.
If you have an irregular site, give the dimensions of the rectangle it fits inside and say what is cut off.
2. The program, counted
Bedrooms, bathrooms, and anything unusual. "Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a study that can take two people" is complete. "Family sized" is not.
Anything you don't count, the generator will size by convention — which is fine for a laundry and a problem for the room you actually care about.
3. Roughly what floor area you are aiming at
A number in square metres, or a range. This is the constraint that decides whether the plan is generous or tight, and it is the one most people leave out, then feel disappointed about.
4. One spatial relationship you care about
This is the part that turns a room list into architecture. One clause:
- "a courtyard between the sleeping and living wings"
- "the kitchen sees the back garden"
- "the studio is separated from the house by a breezeway"
- "you cannot see the bedrooms from the front door"
One is enough. Three fight each other, and the plan spends its floor area resolving the argument.
5. The thing you refuse to have
Negative constraints are unreasonably useful, because they cut whole families of plan off at once. "No corridor longer than 4 m." "No bedroom opening off the living room." "No stairs."
A brief that works
Put together, that is two or three sentences:
Two-bedroom laneway house on a 7.5 x 22 m south-facing lot, street to the
south, single storey, about 95 m2. North light into the living space, with
a courtyard between the sleeping and living wings. No corridor longer
than 4 m.
Nothing in there describes a mood, and every clause changes the plan.
The words that do nothing
Adjectives without a measurement attached are decoration: warm, modern, contemporary, luxurious, cosy, functional, open-plan — the last one only means something as a number, which is what the openness slider is for.
They are not harmful. They just aren't doing the work you think they are, and they crowd out the clause that would have.
Use the sliders for what the sentence can't say
Three constraints sit below the brief and apply to every run:
- Floor area — the target the plan solves to.
- Bedrooms — counted, not inferred.
- Openness — cellular at one end, one continuous living volume at the other.
They are quicker to move than the brief is to rewrite, and moving one and regenerating is the fastest way to find out what a constraint is costing you.
Read the four options before you pick a favourite
One generation returns four different organising moves, not four versions of the same idea. Before deciding which you like, compare the numbers, because the prettiest option is not reliably the best one:
- Circulation over about 15% means the plan is spending your floor area on corridor. Look at the option beside it that doesn't.
- Daylight autonomy under 60% usually means a room is buried in the middle of the plan with no external wall to give it.
- A failed code check tells you which — the egress path, the ceiling height, the window-to-floor ratio, or the bathroom clearance.
Then pick one. The editor, the 3D view, the schedule, and the exports all follow the selected option.
Converge, don't re-roll
The most common mistake after the first generation is to regenerate the whole thing, hoping for something better. That is rolling dice.
Instead: open the plan editor, lock the rooms that are already right, and generate again. The locked rooms come back untouched and everything else is re-solved around them. Two or three rounds of that and you have converged on a scheme rather than collected four unrelated ones.
When the plan is where you want it, render it isometrically and send it to the client — who will understand it immediately, which was the point.
A checklist
Before you hit generate, does your brief say:
- How big the site is, and which way it faces
- How many bedrooms and bathrooms
- Roughly how many square metres
- One relationship between spaces that matters
- One thing you will not accept
If all five are there, the four options that come back will be worth comparing.