The DIY approach to re-envisioning your interior décor, a room or home remodel, or landscape design has never been more at your fingertips than now. Home and landscape design apps are proliferating, providing homeowners with all sorts of resources and incredible technologies for tapping the imagination and visualizing what’s new and next for you.
Home apps exist for choosing sofas, carpet, countertops, and paint; and for calculating costs, reconfiguring objects within a room, doing a remodel, or just having fun. Other apps provide extensive floor plans and 3D modeling.
Here are our five current top picks (and they’re free) for piquing your creativity.
Homestyler
Homestyler helps you build concepts for your DIY projects. The user-oriented program doesn’t require a lot of instruction, and the drag-and-drop functionality allows you to build your own floor plans, templates, and virtual room layouts. There’s a tool for furnishing and decorating that helps you select cabinets, appliances, furnishings, and décor.
HomeByMe
HomeByMe allows you to decorate rooms using products from its catalogs. That means you can plan your design and have access to the actual furniture and décor you used to create your space. Users can switch from 2D to 3D after finishing a floor plan. Or, start with décor, press “summary,” and HomeByMe will create a floor plan with all your furniture and appliances in place.
Planner 5D
It sounds super-techy, but Planner 5D is the largest free interior-planning app in the industry. Scan a room and create a new 3D design in minutes. You can work with simple spaces or get into detailed design ideas replete with architectural specifications. The user-friendly app has 2D and 3D templates, allows you to personalize textures and fabrics, and includes a 4,000-plus object catalog for experimenting with décor. You can also use the app outside to create outdoor rooms.
PRO Landscape Home
PRO Landscape Home gives you all the tools you need to redesign and plan your outdoor gardens and landscapes. You start with a picture of your home, then choose from thousands of options to add color schemes, plants (by color, height and width, bloom, climate zone), hardscaping, lighting, mulch, outdoor art, water features, and anything else you’d like to create the perfect outdoor living space, garden, or landscape.
iScape
A favorite returns: We’ve written about iScape, before. But it remains a No. 1 landscape app for good reason: its popular, easy-to-use design features include a texture tool that allows you to add or replace grass, mulch, stone, or other hardscapes; the ability to save and share images; and a resource list or database that includes trees, shrubs, flowers, grass/groundcover, tropical plants, planters, and water features.
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