Planning
What We Wish Every Burnaby Client Knew Before They Started Designing
Most expensive Burnaby homes get most of the way to great, and stop there. Not because of the brief. Because of assumptions clients held quietly that no designer could fix afterwards. Here are the eight.
Most expensive Burnaby custom homes get most of the way to great, and stop there. The reason is rarely budget. It's a set of assumptions a client walks in holding quietly, never examined, that no designer can fix afterwards.
Here are the eight things we'd love every client to think about before sitting down with an architect for the first time. We work primarily in Burnaby with regular custom builds in Vancouver, Coquitlam, North Vancouver, and the Fraser Valley, and these eight come up in every project regardless of municipality.
1. How light moves through your day
Where do you want morning light? Afternoon light? Where do you not want light, because that's where the screen lives? Most plans get oriented for the view. The best ones get oriented for the light.
The Pacific Northwest amplifies this question. Burnaby gets meaningful seasonal variance: long, low-angle winter sun and long summer days with high-arc light. A south-facing kitchen that feels glorious in July can become a glare problem in February. A north-facing primary bedroom that has the best view from a Capitol Hill or Burnaby Heights lot can also be the darkest room in the house at 6am in November.
What we walk through with clients before a single line is drawn:
- Where the family wakes up and where you want morning light
- Where the family decompresses in the afternoon and what light pattern serves that
- Where the screens live (TVs, laptops, monitors) and how to manage glare
- Where you read, write, or work, and how those activities need to perform across the day
- The seasonal extremes — December at 4pm, July at noon — and how the rooms read in each
2. Where the family actually lives, not where it entertains
Most homes are designed around the formal rooms and lived in around the kitchen. Tell your designer the truth about where the iPad lives, where the coats land, where homework actually happens. The rooms that get used 80% of the time deserve 80% of the design attention.
Practical truths from twenty years of Burnaby custom builds:
- Formal living rooms get used twice a year. Family rooms get used every evening.
- Formal dining rooms get used at Thanksgiving, Christmas, and one or two other moments. Casual eating spots get used three times a day.
- Mudrooms and entry zones absorb daily life. Formal foyers absorb guests.
- Powder rooms get used by visitors. Family bathrooms absorb the load.
The brief should weight design attention toward the high-frequency spaces, not the photograph spaces.
3. Your real relationship with the kitchen
Some families want the kitchen as the social heart of the house. Others want it tucked away. Both are valid. The mistake is letting the trend decide what your family wants.
Open-plan kitchens look great on a magazine spread. They're a terrible idea for someone who needs to clean a frying pan in private. Closed kitchens read as old-fashioned in design publications, but they let one person prep dinner while another helps with homework at the dining table without competing acoustically.
Three patterns we see work well:
- Full open plan: kitchen, dining, living all visible. Best for households where cooking is collaborative and the cook isn't sensitive to mess being visible.
- Galley with a pass-through: kitchen partially screened, with one or two openings to the dining or family room. Best for households that want connection without total visual exposure of the cooking process.
- Closed kitchen with a working pantry: kitchen as a fully separate room, with a butler's pantry or scullery handling staging and mess. Best for households that entertain seriously or simply prefer cooking in private.
There's no wrong answer. There's only the right answer for the specific family.
4. How long you intend to live in the home
A 7-year home and a 30-year home are designed differently. Aging in place, generational flexibility, accessibility. These aren't aesthetic decisions. They're math decisions. They need to be in the brief, not added at year five.
Specific things that matter at the design stage if you're building a forever home:
- Wider doorways at primary openings (32-inch minimum, 36-inch better)
- Zero-threshold or low-threshold showers in at least one bathroom
- A ground-floor primary bedroom suite option, even if the primary suite is upstairs initially
- Reinforced walls in bathrooms for future grab bars
- An elevator-shaft-shaped closet stacked vertically through the floors, ready to be converted to a residential elevator
- Lever door hardware rather than round knobs throughout
These adjustments cost almost nothing during construction and roughly the entire renovation budget after the fact.
5. What you want to never have to think about again
Storage. Laundry routing. Charging stations. Pantry capacity. Off-season clothing. The things that nag a household every day are almost always solvable in the plan, if they're in the plan. They rarely get solved retroactively.
The chronic frustrations in your current home are not noise. They're the most accurate guide you have to what your future home needs. If you constantly fight for closet space, the new home needs more closets. If you can never find a charging cable, the new home needs purpose-built charging stations. If laundry is always somewhere it shouldn't be, the new home needs a laundry strategy designed around your real rhythm.
Make the list. Bring it to the architect. The questions are mundane:
- Where do shoes land coming in the door?
- Where does laundry pile up before it gets processed?
- Where does mail accumulate?
- Where do off-season coats and boots live?
- Where do school backpacks land at 3pm?
- Where does pantry overflow go?
- Where do small appliances live when not in use?
Every one of those is a design problem with a clean solution at the brief stage and an expensive one afterwards.
6. Your appetite for maintenance
Some materials require love. Wood floors with oil finishes. Honed stone. Real plaster. Solid brass. They reward attention and develop character with it. Other clients want zero-maintenance everything. Both are fine. The mistake is choosing patina materials without realising what they ask of you.
Three honest questions:
- Are you the kind of person who oils a butcher block twice a year, or are you the kind of person who would resent that?
- Do you want hardware that develops a patina with use, or do you want hardware that looks the same in year ten as in year one?
- Are you willing to refinish wood floors at year fifteen, or do you want a finish that's permanent (which means a different material entirely)?
Either answer is fine. Mismatching the answer to the spec produces year-three regret on materials that were chosen for the wrong reason.
7. The energy code you'll be designing under
BC's Energy Step Code is in the brief whether you put it there or not. Every new Part 9 home in Burnaby and across BC has to meet at least Step 3 of the BC Energy Step Code, with EL-4 of the Zero Carbon Step Code, as of January 1, 2025. A certified Energy Advisor has to submit energy modeling with the building permit application. By 2032, Step 5 (net-zero ready, roughly equivalent to Passive House) is on track to become the standard for new homes.
Designing for where the code is heading rather than just where it is today has practical implications:
- Window specifications. Step 5 effectively requires triple-glazed units with thermally broken frames and excellent gasket performance. Specifying that today is more expensive than specifying Step 3 minimums, but cheaper than upgrading later.
- Wall assemblies. Step 5-grade wall assemblies typically include continuous exterior insulation in addition to cavity insulation. The thicknesses and detailing differ from Step 3 walls.
- Mechanical sizing. A high-performance envelope means a smaller heat pump, smaller air handlers, smaller ducts. Designing the mechanical room around Step 5 numbers means the systems land smaller and less obtrusive.
- Airtightness strategy. Step 5 requires airtightness testing at 1.0 air changes per hour at 50 Pa or better, which means deliberate detailing at every wall-to-floor, wall-to-roof, and rough-opening transition.
Designing as if the home only has to meet today's minimums often costs more later than designing for where the code is heading. The Step 5 trajectory is well-publicised; it isn't a surprise that needs to be value-engineered around.
8. The bylaws on your specific lot
The eighth assumption owners walk in with is that the building bylaws apply uniformly. They don't. Each Lower Mainland municipality has its own zoning rules, its own tree bylaw, its own permit process, and its own specific quirks.
In Burnaby, the bylaws that affect design most are:
- The Burnaby Tree Bylaw. Any tree 20 cm in trunk diameter or larger on a development-application property is a Protected Tree. Most central Burnaby lots (Burnaby Heights, Capitol Hill, Brentwood, Deer Lake) carry several. Removed protected trees must be replaced one-for-one with substantial replacement specimens.
- Setbacks and height limits. Vary by zone. Capitol Hill and parts of Burnaby Heights have specific height-by-grade calculations that interact with the lot's slope.
- The digital permit transition. As of January 1, 2026, all permit applications in Burnaby are submitted digitally per the City of Burnaby New Home Construction page. Documentation has to be coordinated and complete at submission.
In Vancouver, the bylaws differ. In Coquitlam, North Vancouver, and the Fraser Valley, they differ again. The general rule is: the lot's specific bylaws are part of the brief, and discovering them late is the most common cause of redesign.
If a client walks in with answers to these eight questions on day one, the home gets meaningfully better on the same brief. The hardest decisions are the ones nobody asked you to think about until it was too late.
— Sanj Aggarwal, CHBA BC Master Residential Builder
The brief that beats the budget
A custom-home brief with honest answers to all eight questions is dramatically more efficient than one that doesn't. It's also dramatically less expensive in real terms, because it cuts the cycles of redesign, rebrief, and re-cost that consume project budgets.
The hour spent in self-honesty before the architect is engaged is the most leveraged hour in the entire process. Bring your honest answers to your first design meeting and the meeting becomes a different conversation. The architect's job becomes designing what you actually want, not extracting what you actually want from a generic brief.
The same principle holds across Burnaby, Vancouver, Coquitlam, North Vancouver, and the Fraser Valley. The bylaws change. The architects change. The principles don't.
Related on the Journal
