The price comes before the drawings are frozen.

Where budgets go wrong.

Most budgets go wrong before a wall comes down. Someone asks what the home will cost. There is no drawing yet, so a figure is offered, to be helpful. That figure becomes the budget. Then the drawings arrive, and the figure moves. Nobody lied. The number was never built from anything.

So we price in two stages, in a fixed order. Design first. Then a price you can hold. It sounds obvious. It is rarely done.

Stage one, the budget estimate.

The first number comes from the brief, the size and the standard you want. It is a range, and we say so. Its job is simple. It tells you whether the idea and the budget can live together. You find that out early. Before you pay for a design the money cannot build.

Stage two, the cost plan.

The second number is a detailed cost plan, prepared before contract. It is built from the drawings, not guessed from them. In London a quantity surveyor sits inside the team. The drawings measured are the drawings our own site team will build. The same order holds in Dubai.

A cost plan is the work, measured, line by line. Structure. Services. Joinery, stone, glazing and decoration. The preliminaries, which means site set-up, supervision and protection. Fees. A contingency, stated as a figure, not hidden in the rates. And the provisional sums.

Provisional sums, named.

A provisional sum is an allowance for something you have not decided yet. The bath you have not chosen. The stone you have not seen. There is nothing wrong with one, as long as it is named. The danger is a sum buried in a lump. The price then looks firm when it is not.

We list every provisional sum on its own line. Beside it is the date it needs a decision. When you decide, the allowance becomes a price. The plan gets firmer as the design does.

“A price is built from the drawings, not guessed from them.”

How decisions move the price.

Every design decision is a line in the plan. Move the kitchen and the drainage moves with it. Choose stone in slab rather than tile and the figure changes. Make a window taller and the structure above it changes too.

Decide before the price is fixed, and the price holds. Decide after, and it is a change, with a cost and a delay. So we show you the cost of each decision, while it is still one. Samples you can hold, next to the number they carry.

This is why the interiors are designed before the price is fixed. Layouts, joinery, stone and lighting are decided on paper. There, a change costs a pencil. The finish you see in the cost plan is the finish you get.

What “a price you can hold” means.

It is not a promise that nothing will change. Homes are built by people, in weather, on sites with histories. It is a price where every line has a drawing behind it. Every unknown has a name and a date. Every change is priced before you say yes.

What is left to move is what you choose to move. That is the difference between a price and a guess.