How to Choose a Private Residence

Most people begin with the house. We begin with the year — how a client will actually spend it, and which twelve weeks of it will be spent here.

It sounds like a delaying tactic. It saves months. A buyer who is in residence for three weeks at a time, twice a year, wants a fundamentally different building from one who works from the study every weekday, and the two requirements point at different districts, different plot sizes and different service arrangements long before they point at different houses.

Start with the routine, not the rooms

The most useful question we ask is deliberately mundane: describe a Tuesday. Who is in the house at eight in the morning? Where does breakfast happen? Who else comes and goes — staff, drivers, a trainer, children returning from school — and do they need to cross the family's space to do it?

Plans reveal themselves quickly under that test. A house with a single circulation spine looks generous on paper and becomes tiring when the household is running at full strength. A house with a properly separated service route can be a third smaller and feel considerably larger.

Then the boundary

The second question is what surrounds the plot, and what could. Aspect is easy to check on a viewing; the future is not. We look at the plot ratio permitted next door, the height a neighbour could build to, whether the covenant is enforced in practice, and — in island and lake developments — whether the sightline across the water is protected by anything more than convention.

This is where an afternoon of unglamorous work saves an enormous amount of money. A view is worth a great deal, and a view that cannot be built out is worth considerably more.

Buy the plot and the plan. Everything else in a house can be changed, and usually will be.

Eleven questions, in order

• How many weeks a year will the residence be occupied, and by whom?
• What is the household at full strength — family, guests, staff?
• Which rooms will be used daily, and which twice a year?
• Does the service route cross the family route anywhere?
• What faces the plot, and what could be built on the adjoining land?
• Which elevations take the afternoon sun, and are they shaded?
• Who drew the house, and did they visit the site?
• What has been altered since completion, and with what consent?
• What does the residence cost to run for a year, staffed?
• How is the title held, and what is the service structure?
• If it had to be sold in a slow market, who is the next buyer?

The last question is the important one

Asking who the next buyer is tends to be unwelcome at the point of falling in love with a house, which is precisely why we ask it early. A residence with an obvious next buyer — a good plot, a coherent plan, an address that does not depend on a trend — protects the client in every market condition.

A residence with no obvious next buyer can still be the right purchase. It simply has to be bought with that fact acknowledged, at a price that reflects it, and by someone who intends to keep it for a very long time. That is a decision, not a discovery to be made three years later.

What we do with the answers

The output of this conversation is usually a shortlist of three, drawn from what is available publicly and what is not. Occasionally it is a shortlist of one. Now and again it is advice to wait a season, which is the least profitable thing an advisor can say and, often enough, the correct one.