chief architect home designer suite review

There’s also a framing view, which just shows the design’s wooden skeleton. Additionally, you can pick a dollhouse view, so you can see the interior as well as the exterior. You can switch between the traditional 2D bird-eye view, to a gabled 3D look that will give you a more realistic picture of what it will look like when built. There are several ways to see what your design will look like in progress. Making useful options available while keeping your plan front-and-center is one of the things Chief Architect does best. This makes it easy to change the properties of a wall, center a door or staircase, and calculate materials needed to build a particular room. If you enjoy building digital homes in a game like The Sims, this program will probably come very naturally to you.Īdditionally, granular tools for each object on the plan can be accessed by right-clicking on them. This gives the designing process a very streamlined feel, and once you’re in the flow, creating plans comes quite naturally. Whether you want to put down a wall, place an electrical outlet or insert a door or window, it never takes more than a couple of clicks to do it. If you enjoy building digital homes in a game like The Sims, this program will probably come very naturally to you.Īlmost all the tools you’ll use regularly are accessible from the main window of the interface. Learning this software often feels like the experience of learning a new video game. A simple survey of the tool ribbon gives you a pretty general idea of what everything does.įinding your way around the software becomes easier the longer you experiment with it. But if you’re also one of those people who like to jump into software like this without reading the instructions, you won’t flounder around too long.

If this is your first encounter with home design software, you will feel hopelessly lost. When you open a new design with Home Designer Pro, you’re greeted with a blank sheet of grid paper and several rows and columns of tools.

Lifewire / Jeffrey Daniel Chadwick Design: It feels like a video game

Chief architect home designer suite review