At university, I had a very intelligent and highly experienced Physics lecturer who taught Statics and Dynamics. Ray’s CV boasted senior positions at Airbus, designing the A380, and later at McLaren F1 where he headed up a team of aerodynamicists.

The one thing that he taught, which stuck with me beyond Uniform Distributed Loads and equations lasting pages in length, was about his time at McLaren. Ray explained that their office had a big sign on the wall which read “K.I.S.S” – and they lived by it.

Anyone who knows a little about the engineering in F1 will tell you that the technology and science behind the cars is mind-blowing. Thousands of hours of development go into every little part and tiny detail.

Ray’s team lived in the realms of extremely complicated design, huge data sets and constant evolution, striving to gain a hundredth of a second in performance. But the most important thing they understood was “Keep It Simple, Stupid”, with a simplistic approach and by forming lean teams which performed efficiently.

K.I.S.S is not a new concept – aircraft engineer Kelly Johnson of Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Development Programs is credited with its origin back in the 1960s – but it is incredibly important in any complicated environment, including prime residential construction.

Some years ago, we worked on a new build home which involved every consultant and surveyor you can think of. The monthly site meetings looked like a FTSE 100’s boardroom AGM. It was chaos, and caused chaos. Far too many drawings, too many emails, too many opinions, too much of everything – which made it hard to get answers and clarity. Plus, I dread to think what the fees looked like for the client.

Sure, the house was incredible, but not necessarily better than some of the properties we have built with a fraction of the people involved. As good as the end product was, I wouldn’t call it a particularly “successful” project, simply based on the struggles that the team went through to deliver it and the bloated budget which came with it.

As a client, it is incredibly important to assemble a team of professionals that has the experience to deliver your vision and I’m in no way saying you should build a basic house, but if I could offer one piece of advice: it would be to avoid getting sucked into building an overly complicated house or feeling the need to employ a consultant for every element of your build – unless that is what you really want. The luxury market has a knack of upselling at every turn, and it is easy to fall for the “more means better” pitch.

We are very happy to work with large project teams (it’s become normal to some extent) as construction has become ever more complicated, but if an F1 design team keeps it as simple as possible, it won’t do much harm to think along those lines when you’re planning your dream home.

Jeremy