Before starting to build your own home, or carrying out extensive renovation work, you'll need to turn to a design professional - someone with the right credentials and experience. "It's all very well having a project manager, but at the heart of every great design is an architect," says George Clarke, presenter of Channel 4's The Home Show. "They can add an awful lot of value to your house - not just monetary, but in terms of making your space work for you. And they're not just for the rich and famous."
To give you a taster, the Royal Institute of British Architects (Riba) is running its annual Architect in the House scheme. In return for a £40 donation to the housing charity Shelter, you can get a free hour's consultation from a participating architect, either for general inspiration or to help solve a particular problem.
The scheme is now in its 13th year. In 2005, Shirley Hiscock, 43, a homeopath, signed up to get advice about what to do with the family home in Bellingdon, Buckinghamshire, that she shares with her husband, Ian, 43, and their two children, Freya, now 13, and Madeleine, 11.
"We had owned our house for eight years," she says, "but it was a 1970s chalet-style home, made up of all sorts of materials, with dormer windows - a real cacophony. No matter how much money we threw at kitchens and bathrooms, it just didn't work."
After an hour's consultation with Amersham-based Jane Duncan Architects (and a donation of £20 to Shelter), they took on the firm's Jonathan Dale as architect and project manager at a cost of £50,000.
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Dale changed the orientation of the house so all the main rooms had views, turned bathrooms into bedrooms, added a galleried hallway and clad the house in cedar. Hiscock says they spent £250,000 in all. They are now reluctantly selling up to move abroad for work (£795,000, through Savills; 01494 725636, savills.co.uk). "The house he created was exactly what we wanted; we would not be moving if we didn't have to," she says.
Sign up to the scheme at www.architectinthehouse.org.uk by July 1