Sequence is the cheapest decision you will make
You can spend on marble or you can spend on order. Order costs nothing and it is what a visitor notices first, because a building is never seen all at once. It is walked through.
A plan that is thought about as a route, rather than as a set of rooms with doors between them, answers most of the questions a client brings to a first meeting.
What the entry has to do
The entry sequence has one job before any other: tell a visitor where they are and where they are meant to go. A plan that does this well removes the small daily friction of a building. A plan that ignores it puts a question mark at the front door that the rest of the house then has to answer.
On site this usually means a change of level, a change of light, or a change of material. Any one of the three is enough. All three at once is usually too much.
An example from practice
On an Aligarh house, the route runs from the street, past a screen, into a court, and only then into the house. The court is the point. It separates the two things the family asked for: a private core and a place to receive guests without the whole house being on show.
Nothing about that decision needed a larger budget. It needed the route to be drawn before the rooms were.
Where the drawings start
On our projects the first drawing is rarely a plan. It is a section, because a section tells you what a person will actually see and how the light will arrive. The plan follows from that, not the other way round.
That order also makes the drawings easier to read for everyone who has to use them. A contractor can price sequence. A contractor cannot price atmosphere.