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How to know what you want
Lahav Meiri, licensed renovation contractor · Published 3 August 2026
Most people can't answer "what do you want in your home?" directly, and that isn't a failure of imagination. Wanting isn't something you retrieve from inside yourself - it forms while you're being asked. The way to find out what you want is to answer easier questions whose answers add up to it.
This is the method: which questions actually work, why the obvious ones don't, and why the images you've saved are telling you less than you think.
One thing worth knowing before you start: the last section is the questions themselves. They're not about the house.
Why the direct question doesn't work
Ask someone what they want in a home and you'll get one of three answers: a room count, a style word, or "I'm not sure."
None of them are wrong. They're just what the question produces. "What do you want" asks you to summarise something you've never articulated, on the spot, with no reference points. Nobody performs well at that.
The assumption underneath it is that the answer already exists inside you and you simply need to access it. It doesn't. You have preferences, habits, frustrations and instincts - and a want is what forms when those get organised by the right question.
Which is good news. It means you're not missing something other people have. You just haven't been asked properly yet.
You just haven't been asked properly yet
Ask the questions next to it instead
The reliable method is to stop asking the big question and ask smaller ones whose answers add up.
What's wrong with where you live now?
The most productive question in the entire process, and the easiest. You have years of evidence. Every daily irritation is a design requirement in disguise.
Where do you actually spend your time?
Not where you'd like to. Walk through a normal week. Some rooms you'll realise you barely enter.
What do you do that the house makes harder?
Cooking together, working, having people over, getting everyone out in the morning.
What have you noticed in other people's homes?
Not admired - noticed. The thing you keep thinking about afterwards.
What would you refuse to give up?
Fastest way to find what actually matters. Everything else is negotiable, which is useful to know.
None of these ask you to imagine a house. They ask you to describe a life you're already living. That's a much easier task, and the answers are more reliable.
Every daily irritation is a design requirement in disguise
The problem with saved images
Everyone starts with a folder of pictures. It feels like progress and it's the wrong tool for this job.
Images tell you what you like the look of. They can't tell you how you want to live, because they don't contain that information. A photographed kitchen shows you a finish, a light, a shape. It doesn't show you two people cooking in it at once, or where the school bags land.
There's also a trap in the volume. One designer put it plainly: you'll always find something you like just as much, which is why saving more images makes the decision harder rather than easier.
Use them, but use them second. Work out how you want to live first, then use images to describe the feel of it. In that order they're useful. In the other order they replace the thinking rather than support it.
Two ways to ask the same thing
What do you want in your kitchen?
Something bigger. Open, I think. Modern.
What annoys you about your kitchen now?
We both cook and we collide. There's nowhere to put shopping down. The kids do homework at the table so we can't eat until they're done.
The gap between the house you picture and the week you live
People don't build the wrong house because they choose badly. They build it because they design for an imagined version of their life rather than the actual one.
UCLA researchers filmed and documented 32 American families in their own homes. They found that formal dining rooms were virtually never used, except for holiday entertaining. Separately, an Angie's List survey found only 23% of Americans eat their evening meals in a dedicated dining room.
Nobody built a dining room they didn't want. They built the room they associated with the family they hoped to be - and then lived somewhere else in the house.
This is the most expensive kind of mistake, because it's invisible while you're making it. Nothing feels wrong. The room just quietly goes unused for thirty years.
The test: for every space you're planning, name the actual hour of the actual day it gets used. If you can't, it's a room you're picturing rather than a room you need.
A room you're picturing rather than a room you need
The questions that work
Take these one at a time. Don't try to answer them all at once, and don't try to be impressive.
Describe last Tuesday evening in your current home, hour by hour.
Where were you, where was everyone else, what was annoying.
Which room do you walk through and never stop in?
There's always one. Ask why.
What do you do somewhere that isn't designed for it?
Working at the kitchen table, folding laundry on the bed, the kids doing homework wherever there's space.
When someone comes over, what happens?
Where do they sit, where do you end up, what do you apologise for.
What's the first thing you'd change about where you live, if it were free?
And the second. And the third. That's your priority order, and you just produced it without trying.
What do you want that you haven't said out loud?
There's usually something. It's usually the thing that would have mattered most.
These are the questions worth answering slowly. Nestbrief asks them one at a time.
See how it works →You know more than you can say
Everything an architect needs from you already exists. It's in the way you use the place you live now, in the things that irritate you daily, in what you notice at other people's houses. What's missing isn't the knowledge. It's the shape.
Nestbrief asks you these questions one at a time, at home, at your own pace. When you say you want a bigger kitchen, it asks what for. When you're not sure, it helps you think it through instead of moving on. Nothing to prepare, nothing to fill in - you just talk.
This is what comes out of it:
One conversation, and what you knew all along has words.
Common questions
- How long does it take to work out what you want?
- Less time than people expect, once the questions are the right ones. What takes a long time is staring at the direct question and getting nowhere.
- Should I decide before I meet an architect?
- You don't need answers to everything. But the further you've got, the more of that first meeting goes into design instead of extraction.
- What if my partner and I want different things?
- Then you've found something valuable early. Answer separately before comparing - the differences are much easier to work with when they're visible.
- Can an architect just tell me what I want?
- A good one will draw it out of you, which is different. They can't invent your life for you, and you wouldn't want a house designed by someone who tried.