What to send your designer before the first meeting

Late afternoon, and the light has gone long and low across the terrace. Somebody has left a book face down on the outdoor table. There is a smell of cut grass and warm stone, and the pool has gone completely still, holding the shape of the trees along its far edge.

You know this place. You have been walking through it in your head for two years, usually at about eleven at night when the house has gone quiet. You know where you would come out of the doors and which way you would turn. You know that the seating faces west because you want the last of the sun, and that there is a low wall you can sit on without thinking about it, and that the boundary has disappeared behind something green and dense and taller than a person.

What you cannot tell anybody is where the water goes when it rains hard, or how much the ground drops between the house and the fence, or why the far corner has never grown anything properly.

That garden is designable. Every part of it. But the design gets built out of information about your property, and most of that information lives with you and nowhere else.

Quick answer: Send four things. A site survey or title plan showing boundaries and, if you have it, levels. Photographs and a slow video walk taken from the places you use. The locations of anything buried, such as drains, power, septic and irrigation. And a short list of what cannot move. A topographic survey costs around $1,600 to $2,500 plus GST for a straightforward urban site, and it is the one item you may need to pay for.

What is your designer trying to work out?

Three things, in this order: what the property is, how you want to live in it, and what is fixed.

The second one comes out in conversation, and you already have all of it. The first and third are the ones that need paper, photographs and a bit of digging around in a drawer. They are also the ones that set the budget, because a design drawn without them gets revised once the truth turns up, and revisions cost either fee time or built work.

Everything below is in service of that. None of it needs to be complete before you talk to anybody.

Which documents matter, and where do you find them?

Five, in rough order of usefulness.

A site or topographic survey. The most valuable document there is. It shows boundaries, levels, contours, existing structures, trees and often the drains. A design drawn over a survey can be built from. A design drawn without one is a sketch of an idea.

Your title plan or deed plan. Boundary dimensions and, importantly, easements: the strips of your land that somebody else has rights over. Free or close to it from your land registry.

House drawings. Floor plans and elevations, at any age. These tell a designer where the doors are, which rooms look out where, and what floor level the house sits at. Floor level is the number everything outside gets measured from.

Your property file from the local authority. Under various names in different countries, this is the folder of everything ever consented on the site: drainage plans, old building work, septic layouts, resource consent conditions. Often it holds the buried services drawing you assumed did not exist.

Any reports you had at purchase or at build. Geotechnical, soil, contamination, arborist. A soil report changes what can be planted and what has to be drained.

Send scans or PDFs rather than photographs of paper where you can, and send the original digital file if you have one. A surveyor’s file, usually a DWG, can be drawn on directly. A photograph of a printed survey cannot be scaled, so its numbers become a guess.

How should you photograph the property?

Stand where you live, not where an estate agent would stand.

The instinct is to walk to the far corner of the lawn and take a tidy wide shot with the house centred. That image is close to useless. A designer needs the views you have several times a day.

From inside, looking out. Kitchen window, the doors you use, the room you sit in at night. These frames are what the design is composed for.
From each corner of the property, looking back towards the house.
Straight down at the ground where surfaces meet: the step down off the terrace, where the paving stops and the lawn starts, the join nobody has solved.
From an upstairs window if you have one. It is the closest thing to a plan view.
The parts you are embarrassed by. The bins, the drying area, the heat pump unit, the dead corner. Those are the problems being solved, and hiding them just means solving them later.

Then take a video. Walk slowly through the property with the camera held steady at chest height, talking as you go, and record one continuous take rather than clips. Say what you like, what you hate, what floods, where the wind comes from, what the neighbours can see. Five minutes of that is more useful than fifty photographs, because it carries the sequence of the place: how one space arrives at the next, which is the thing a plan drawing hides.

One practical note. Send the files by email, a shared drive or a file transfer service rather than a messaging app. Most messaging apps compress images heavily and strip the location and orientation data, so what arrives is a smaller, flatter picture with nothing attached to it.

What if you have no survey and no levels?

Then say so plainly, and send the cheap substitutes, which are better than nothing.

Count the steps between one level and the next and measure the height of one riser. Steps times riser height gives a usable level difference.
Photograph every retaining wall with a tape measure held against it.
Mark on an aerial image, printed or on screen, where water sits after heavy rain and how long it takes to go.
Note the high point and the low point of the property as you experience them walking it.

That gets a concept drawn. It does not get a construction detail, because a step, a wall or a drainage fall built from an estimated level is a rebuild waiting to happen.

If the project involves changes of level, retaining, a pool or anything with water moving across it, the survey stops being optional. A topographic survey of a straightforward urban site of up to about 850 square metres costs in the region of $1,600 to $2,500 plus GST. A larger, steeper or more heavily vegetated site sits between $2,800 and $4,500. Against a build, it is the smallest line item and the one that protects all the others. Those are New Zealand figures, so if you are reading this elsewhere the shape holds but the numbers will not, and a local surveyor will quote you in an afternoon.

What needs saying about anything buried?

Everything you know, even if you are not sure it is accurate.

Water main, power, gas, sewer, stormwater, septic tank and field, irrigation lines, pool plant and pipework, fibre, garden lighting circuits, an EV charger cable, the soakage pit somebody put in fifteen years ago. Photograph the meter box and any inspection covers, and mark roughly where things go on an aerial image.

This matters more than it sounds. Excavation costs money, and discovering a sewer line under the place the pool was drawn is the kind of surprise that arrives with a variation attached. It is also the reason nothing large gets specified over a septic field, however good the position looks on paper.

What cannot move?

Write the list. It is usually shorter than people expect and it saves the most time of anything here.

Trees you will not lose, and any that carry a protection status.
Boundaries, easements, covenants, and any body corporate or association rules on what can be built or planted.
The view you are protecting, and the view you are trying to block.
Fixed services: the septic field, the pump shed, the transformer.
Anything with meaning attached. A tree planted for somebody, a bench, a gate from the old house. Nobody will guess these, and losing one in a drawing is a bad way to start.

Then the other half of the same list. What you would happily lose. The lawn nobody uses, the shed, the row of conifers along the drive. Permission to remove things is often what unlocks a plan.

What do you do with the images you have saved?

Send them, with three words each.

A folder of saved images is genuine information about your taste, and the fact that they look inconsistent to you does not make them inconsistent. A designer reads them for the thing underneath: the same wall colour showing up eleven times, a preference for level changes, a complete absence of curves.

What multiplies their value is a note on why each one is there. “The width of these steps.” “This planting, not this house.” “The way the light comes through.” Without that, a strong image can send a design somewhere you never intended, because you saved a courtyard for its paving and a designer takes it as a request for a courtyard.

Say what you dislike as well. People describe the garden they want with difficulty and the garden they do not want with precision.

What should you not bother sending?

A plant list. It comes at the end, and starting there narrows the design before it exists.

A tidied-up property. Photograph it as it is, mess included, since the mess shows how the place is used.

A budget to the dollar. A range is more useful and commits you to less. The same courtyard drawn for a modest range and a large one are two different layouts from the first line, so a designer without a range has to guess, and the guess wastes somebody’s money in one direction or the other.

A finished plan of your own, if you want the design opened up rather than tidied. Send it by all means, but say which parts are requirements and which are just your best attempt at solving it.

How does this change when your designer is on the other side of the world?

The pack stops being helpful and becomes the site visit.

A designer working remotely cannot walk your property, so what you send is the property as far as the design is concerned. So the survey matters more, the video walk matters more, and one or two specific things get added.

A slow video with narration, filmed at the time of day you use the space most, and a second one on a wet day if you can manage it.
Something of known size in the frame for scale. A metre rule, a chair, a person standing at the boundary.
Which direction is north, marked on an aerial image. Sun path is calculable from anywhere on earth, but only once somebody knows which way the property faces.
A note on your climate in your own words. Not the annual rainfall figure. What the wind does in August, whether the ground freezes, which month everything browns off.

There are things a remote designer cannot get from any file. That the soil in the far corner is heavier than the rest. The road. The neighbour’s security light coming on at ten past nine. That is what the video narration and the questions are for, and it is why a good remote process asks more of you at the start and less of you later.

Common questions

Do I need a survey before the first meeting?

No. Bring what you have and the conversation will tell you whether the project needs one. Plenty of gardens are designed and built beautifully without a survey; anything involving levels, retaining or water is not one of them.

How recent does a survey need to be?

Boundaries and contours do not change, so an old survey is still valuable. What ages is everything built since: extensions, decks, pools, retaining, new drains. Send the old one and describe what has changed.

What file formats are most useful?

PDF for drawings and reports. DWG or DXF if you have the surveyor’s original, since it can be drawn on to scale. Photographs straight off the phone, full size. Video as the original file rather than a link that expires.

Can I just send a hand-drawn sketch?

Yes, and it is often revealing. A sketch shows what you are prioritising and how you think the spaces connect. Mark on it anything you have measured, and say which numbers are measured and which are estimated.

Should I tell you my budget?

A range is enough, and it makes the first design better rather than worse. It determines materials, the extent of the works and whether the project happens in one go or three stages.

I have none of this. Can we still start?

Yes. A conversation, a phone video and an aerial image are enough to begin, and the documents can be gathered while the concept is developing. The order is flexible; the information is not optional forever.

Send what you have, in whatever state it is in. The gaps are easy to fill once somebody knows which gaps matter.