Designing your new home

If you're planning a full new-build house or a granny flat, Draftly's design brief walks you through what you want the place to actually contain — before any drawing happens. Think of it as the questionnaire an architect or draftsperson would run you through at a first meeting, turned into a short, structured wizard.

This feature is still coming together. Where it's live, here's what it does and doesn't do.

What the wizard captures

It comes in four short screens, always after your address and site research are done:

Household — how many bedrooms (and who gets a walk-in robe, a built-in robe, or none), living areas (a separate theatre or rumpus room, a study nook), bathrooms and ensuites, the kitchen (butler's pantry, island bench), how the laundry sits (its own room, European/in-a-cupboard, or in the garage), outdoor entertaining areas, and garage/carport/shed.
Building scope — single or double storey, the external wall system (brick veneer, full brick, render, timber or steel cladding — you can pick a primary and an optional secondary/accent), and the roof (type, material, pitch).
Site constraints — a read-only recap of what your verified site research already found: zone, setbacks, overlays, easements. Nothing to answer here, just a reminder of what your site allows before you shape a design around it.
Summary — everything you've chosen in one place, plus any warnings (see below).

Every answer is a pick from a list, a toggle, or a count — there's no free text. That's deliberate: it keeps the brief something the app (and later, Engineering) can actually read and act on, rather than a paragraph that has to be interpreted by hand.

You can change your mind. Every screen is editable at any point, and switching between "house" and "granny flat" resets you to that type's starting point (a sensible default set of answers) so you're never stuck with a mismatched brief.

Warnings, not roadblocks

On the Summary screen, Draftly checks your brief for things worth a second look — for example, a granny flat with more bedrooms than typical for its class, or a tiled roof paired with a very low pitch. Every warning is shown with an honesty tag:

standard — backed directly by a cited rule (a building code clause, a state planning instrument).
assumed — an industry norm or product convention, not a hard rule.
verify — something Draftly hasn't confirmed and you should check yourself (most often a state-specific granny-flat rule).

Warnings are informational only. Draftly never blocks you from an answer or silently changes what you picked — if something looks off, it tells you why and lets you decide.

Facade style — and what a Heritage Overlay changes

On the Building scope screen, after wall system and roof, you can pick a facade style — the overall look (Modern, Hamptons, Coastal, Federation, Californian Bungalow, and others) rather than the construction system underneath it. Every style shows what it's built from and a rough cost indication: current styles show an upgrade band (what a builder typically adds over a base facade); heritage styles show "quote required" instead — heritage-matching materials vary too much for one honest number. You can always pick "No preference" and decide later.

If your wall system or roof pitch doesn't suit the style you picked, you'll see an amber note explaining the mismatch — for example, Hamptons usually reads over weatherboard-look cladding, so choosing brick veneer gets flagged. This is informational only; nothing stops you from picking it anyway.

If your verified site research found a Heritage Overlay, the facade section switches into heritage mode:

A banner explains what the overlay means for your state — most states (Victoria, NSW, Queensland) have a specific, cited planning-permit trigger for works in a Heritage Overlay; states Draftly hasn't sourced yet show a "verify with council" note instead of a guess.
Heritage-suited styles (Victorian, Federation/Queen Anne, Edwardian, Californian Bungalow, Interwar/Art Deco, Queenslander) are listed first and labelled "Suited to heritage streetscapes."
Picking a non-heritage style still works, but you'll see a warning quoting a few of the relevant design principles (matching materials/proportion/mass without pastiche, keeping the streetscape's spacing and rhythm, matching the dominant roof form) plus a reminder that heritage design decisions are council's call, not Draftly's.
A "Designing in a heritage area" panel lists all six design principles Draftly knows about, each sourced, plus a likely cost range: you will probably need a Heritage Impact Statement (roughly $1,500 for a simple, contributory property up to $15,000+ for something complex or individually significant) as part of your permit application.

Draftly never approves or denies a heritage design. Every heritage-mode note is either a fact from your verified research (the overlay itself) or a cited planning principle/clause — the actual decision on whether a design is acceptable in a heritage area sits with your council, always.

Granny flat size and bedroom limits vary by state

Secondary dwelling ("granny flat") rules — maximum floor area, bedroom counts, whether a streamlined/permit-exempt pathway exists — are set state by state, and sometimes council by council within a state. Draftly only asserts a number where it has a specific, cited source (for example, a clause in a state planning instrument); everywhere else it says "verify with your council" rather than guessing. Don't treat an unconfirmed figure as a green light — check current local rules before relying on any size or bedroom ceiling for your project.

Covenants and caveats — what we check, and what no search can find

Title-based restrictions — building envelopes, single-dwelling covenants, minimum floor areas, materials/facade rules — don't show up in any government spatial layer Draftly reads automatically. The Site constraints screen always shows an amber note:

Registered covenants not checked — check your title. Estate (developer) covenants may exist that NO search can find — check your contract of sale.

Both halves matter, and neither one goes away:

Registered covenants — the kind that shows up as a dealing on a title search — run with the land and bind whoever owns it. Draftly can't order that search for you yet, but you can upload the document once you have it (see below) and we'll help you find the relevant terms.
Developer (estate) covenants — facade rules, minimum floor areas, fencing conditions — are usually contractual, not registered, chain- enforced between buyers in an estate, and often expire a year or two after construction. No title search, paid or free, will ever find these. The only place they show up is your contract of sale or the estate's own paperwork. Check that yourself before assuming your design is clear to build — this amber note stays amber even if you've uploaded a title search, because a clean title search never rules this class out.

Upload a document to check for covenant terms

On the Site constraints screen, you can upload a PDF — a title search, register search, s88B instrument, or contract of sale — and Draftly will scan it with the same AI document-reading tool used elsewhere for planning documents (it only ever reads what's in your document; it never invents or guesses a planning fact). Every term it finds is shown to you individually, with the exact wording it was found in, tagged verify, with two buttons: Confirm or Not applicable. Nothing is added to your brief until you click Confirm on that specific term — an upload never auto-applies anything, and it never turns the amber banner green.

Confirmed terms stay listed for as long as you're working on this brief, and you can remove one at any time. If you confirm a single-dwelling restriction while designing a granny flat, or a no-second-storey restriction while your brief is set to two storeys, Draftly shows a prominent warning that this is worth getting advice on before you go further — it never blocks you, because the final call always depends on the exact wording of your document.

A couple of states are different

South Australia publishes Land Management Agreements on the free SAPPA map (plan.sa.gov.au) — a public layer covering the whole state. Check your lot there in addition to anything you upload.
The ACT doesn't use title covenants the way other states do — it's a leasehold system, so the real constraint is your Crown Lease's purpose clause, a document you already hold. The Site constraints screen tells you to check your lease instead of prompting a title search; you can still upload a document if you have one.

Every other state (Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, Western Australia, Tasmania, Northern Territory) stays a plain upload prompt for now — Draftly hasn't wired a live per-lot check for any of them yet.

Cost indication — what the numbers are and aren't

On the Summary screen, alongside your brief, Draftly shows an early cost indication: a short list of line items (estimated floor area, a whole-of-build rate, your facade upgrade if you picked one, a wall-system reference rate, a Heritage Impact Statement line if a Heritage Overlay applies) with a total or subtotal underneath.

Every line carries the same honesty tag as everything else in Draftly:

assumed lines have a real rate behind them — reused from elsewhere in the product where one exists (for example, the granny-flat build rate matches the same seed Draftly's early works pre-check uses) — with a documented ± spread added for early-stage uncertainty.
verify lines mean no defensible rate exists yet, so the band is left blank rather than guessed. The most common one today: there is no whole-of-build $/m² rate for a new house yet anywhere in Draftly — only granny flats have one. That line stays "verify" until a proper rate book is built; nothing is invented to fill the gap.

Because of that, you'll sometimes see a subtotal instead of a total — if any line that's supposed to count toward the total is unpriced, Draftly shows the sum of the priced lines only, with a note explaining what's missing, rather than a total that quietly excludes a big chunk of the actual cost. A couple of lines (the floor-area estimate, the wall-system reference rate) are shown for information only and are never added into either figure, so nothing gets counted twice.

If your project sits outside a capital city, a location loading line may appear too, using the same regional-cost-adjustment practice as Draftly's quoting tools elsewhere — again shown separately, never baked silently into the base figures.

This is a starting point for a conversation, not a quote. Every dollar figure here is assumed, and the banner says so: "Early indication only — assumed rates, not a quote." Get a real quote from a builder once your brief and site are settled.

A concept sheet for your exact lot

Once a preset template fits your brief and your verified buildable envelope (the Presets screen), you can generate a one-page A3 concept sheet: your lot boundary, the buildable envelope with every setback edge labelled and tagged, the preset's footprint placed and rotated to fit, its internal zone layout (garage, living, bedrooms, alfresco, and so on), the reasons it fits, and your site facts — laid out like a real drawing sheet, not a mockup. It's rendered on the server from the exact same fit check that produced the preset card, so nothing about the placement or the "why it fits" reasons is re-typed or re-guessed for the sheet — it's the identical result, just drawn. What it is not: a floor plan a builder could quote or build from, a compliance check, or anything more precise than the preset's parametric footprint band. Every sheet carries a "CONCEPT DESIGN — NOT FOR CONSTRUCTION" banner that can't be removed, for exactly the reason the rest of this wizard stays a concept brief (see below) — it's a picture of the fit, not a design.

Everything here is a concept brief, not construction documents

Nothing produced by this wizard — the brief itself, or anything built from it later — is a substitute for a building permit set, a structural engineer's drawings, or a certifier's sign-off. Every dwelling output Draftly produces carries a "concept only" banner until real structural integration (framing and slab design to the relevant Australian Standards) is built and verified. Treat this stage as getting your requirements straight before design starts, not as the design itself.

Last reviewed 2026-07-24 · All help topics