Why we draw at 1:5
Most of a project’s quality — and most of its cost overruns — are decided at junctions that never appear in a rendering.
A rendering shows you a room. A 1:5 drawing shows you whether that room can actually be built for the number in your budget. The two are frequently in disagreement, and the disagreement is always resolved on site, at the worst possible moment, unless somebody has drawn it first.
Take a simple condition: where a lime-plastered wall meets a wide-plank oak floor. At 1:100 it is a line. At 1:5 it is a decision — shadow gap or skirting, how the plaster is stopped, what happens when the timber moves 3mm across a monsoon, and who is responsible for the sequencing. Four questions, each with a cost and a look attached.
We produce somewhere between forty and ninety of these drawings on a residential project. It is unglamorous work and it is the single clearest predictor of whether the finished house will look like the design.