Six building types, one set of disciplines.

New-build hotels, conversions of existing buildings, aparthotels and serviced accommodation. The decisions that matter are made early: the servicing and delivery strategy, the acoustic separation between rooms and between floors, the back-of-house circulation that keeps operations out of guest space, and the plant provision the brand standard will eventually demand. Conversions add a further question — whether the existing floor-to-floor height can accommodate the services distribution a modern room requires.

Gyms, boutique studios and leisure centres. These are structural and mechanical buildings first. Free-weight areas impose floor loadings and impact noise that a standard commercial slab is not designed for; studio spaces need ventilation rates well above office provision; and where there is a pool, the humidity, the ventilation and the corrosion environment govern the design of everything around it.

Restaurants, bars and food halls. The kitchen extract route to a compliant discharge point is the single most common reason an otherwise sound F&B scheme fails, and it has to be resolved before the section is fixed rather than after. Alongside it sit grease management, gas provision, refuse strategy, and a licensing position that is easier to secure with the environmental health officer's early input than to defend at hearing.

Schemes where a leisure or hospitality floor sits beneath residential or commercial storeys. Almost all of the risk lives at the interface: acoustic separation between a late-licensed use and bedrooms above, vibration isolation, independent servicing and refuse routes, separate escape strategies, and a management structure that will still work once the two uses are in different ownership.

Clubhouses, pavilions and community sports facilities. Usually a fixed budget, frequently a funding condition attached to it, often a committee or trustee board to carry, and almost always a season or a grant deadline to hit. The discipline here is scoping honestly at the start so that what is promised is what gets delivered.

Bringing an existing leisure asset back to a lettable standard. Frequently the better return and reliably the more complicated exercise, because the building has already made its decisions and will tell you which ones it is prepared to revisit. Surveys first, assumptions last — the cost of an unexpected structural or asbestos finding on a live programme is out of all proportion to the cost of looking properly beforehand.