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Home Designer Suite is one of the best home design applications we reviewed. It has enough advanced features, and while it has a small learning curve, it’s easily accessible by all users. It’s Home Builder Wizard simplifies the process of creating the base floor plan you can later edit with objects and rooms of your choice. Although it lacks a kitchen design wizard, it offers a step-by-step guide to simplify the process.
Chief Architect’s Home Designer Suite is a premium 3D home design application made to suite even the most demanding users, while being accessible enough so that beginners can use it as well. Since it’s stocked with professional CAD tools, the app has a small learning curve, but once you overcome it, you can create designs like a pro.
The Basics
Once you start the app and choose to create a new project, the House Builder Wizard feature helps you set up a base floor plan by asking you questions about the size and number of rooms, the minimum size of the house and other details. The feature then creates a floor plan according to your answers, but in case you don’t like what you see, you can drag and drop rooms, walls and other objects in the plan. If you’re doing renovations on your existing home, you’re going to want to import your home’s floor plan and work directly on it. You can also upload images you found online and design your home according to them. Although the app does have a roof wizard, unfortunately, it doesn’t do a perfect job. Most top tier software have a roofing wizard that automatically covers your floor plan no matter the shape, while this one does so but it requires you to do manual corrections if the floor plan is shaped in anything other than a rectangle or square. To further help with planning your new house, Home Designer Suite has a price estimator that creates a rough estimate of the supplies and materials you’ll need, as well as the final cost of the finished project. And while the actual price might vary from the estimation, it’s still a good thing to have a rough number you can work around.
Interior and Landscape Design
Home Designer Suite has an objects library with more than 6,500 items like appliances, flooring, carpeting, different types of fabric, furniture and more. The app allows you to take any object like a couch, or a stove and customize the color, size and style to fit your particular design best. If you still can’t find your perfect item among the 6000 + objects in the library, you can always import 2D or 3D objects and add them to your project. Although this home design software doesn’t feature a kitchen design wizard that would help with creating your kitchen space, it does have a detailed guide that should be enough to ease your way through the process.
Once you’ve finished designing the interior of your house, it’s time to look outside and to envision your future garden, deck or pool outside of your home. Home Designer Suite has different landscaping tools that let you manipulate terrain so you can make hills, ravines, add water features, but also create decks and fences. The outdoors plant library has more than 1,500 different plants and vegetation you can use to design the space around your home. Like with the interior design tools, all landscaping objects you create can be fully customized to fit your project perfectly. Additionally, the app lets you easily design your perfect pool, hot tub or barbeque area. You can add lights and exterior furniture from the objects library to get a more complete design.
Features:
Price: $99.00
Phone number: 208-292-3375
Website: www.homedesignersoftware.com/products/home-designer-suite
Support: www.homedesignersoftware.com/support
Facebook: www.facebook.com/ChiefArchitect
If you need some answers about your new software, Chief Architect’s website has a knowledgebase and a FAQ section you can browse. To contact live support, you can call or submit an online ticket.
Our editorial staff evaluates products and services independently, but Best Review Guide may earn money when you click on links. Read our advertising disclosure.