Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2662 in Software
• Brand: Chief Architect
• Model: 045-501-CAN
• Released on: 2005-04-29
• Platforms: Windows NT, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Me, Windows XP

Mike Bell, FCA Shorewood
"Dollar for dollar Home Designer offers much more for far less then other home design programs."

Manufacturer's Description
Better Homes and Gardens Home Designer Suite 6.0;Powerful Home Design Software:

• Home Design
• Remodeling
• Landscaping
• Decks
• Kitchen and Bath Design
• Interior Design
• Cost Estimating
• 3D Models and Virtual Tours
• Better Homes and Gardens Design Planning Center
• Powerful, Fun, and Easy!
• Free Tutorial CD
• Over 1,500 Sample Plans
• No Design Experience Needed!

  3D Models and Virtual Tours Provide Realistic Views

  • Produce realistic images of your home designs and remodeling projects
  • Glass House View provides a full translucent view of the interior and exterior, simultaneously
  • Doll House View, a 3D view without the roof, provides a very effective overview tool for space-planning to determine room size, furniture placement, and traffic flow
  • Create and take a virtual walk-through of your house
  • Take individual pictures (renders) of your design that can be saved in any image format
  • Visualize your home with day and night views
  • Print and assemble a scale model of your design with Model Maker
  • Generate shadows from the sun for realistic 3D views

  Design Tools

  • Use the Design Planning Center to help guide your designs with decorating guidelines, tips, and advice on selecting materials
  • Over 1,500 sample home plans to inspire your design
  • Create a virtual look and feel of the design before it is built with actual colors, flooring, furniture, windows, and window treatments
  • Material Painter allows you to apply materials to individual items. For example, spray the countertop with granite, change the cabinets to cherry wood, or paint the wall your favorite color.
  • Define your own lighting and electrical plan

  Building Tools

  • Choose from six Home Design Style templates
  • The Build House Wizard provides a quick way to layout adjoining rooms to help create your design or remodeling project
  • Quickly place and arrange walls, windows, doors, cabinets, and architectural objects from a library of over 4,300 items to create a 3D model in minutes
  • Automatically generates a Materials List into a spreadsheet form for project cost estimating
  • Complete automatic building tools for roof generation, framing, dimensioning, foundations, and electrical outlet placement
  • Easily design kitchens with plans and 3D layouts
  • Create customized cabinets with a simple drag-and-drop tool
  • Detail cabinets with color, wood type, countertop material, door/drawer styles, open shelving, backsplash, crown molding, millwork, and cabinet hardware including hinges, handles, and pulls
  • Complete set of CAD tools to detail designs
  • Plan Check automatically compares the design against standard building principles

  Landscaping and Deck Tools

  • Landscape design tools to create hills and valleys from custom landscapes
  • Fence, garden, driveway, path, and other terrain feature tools included
  • Create plot and perimeter plans on flat or hillside lots: automatically generate a 3D model of the actual terrain
  • Deck tools include post-and-beam foundation automatically generated to match your lot
  • Select from over 1,000 plants, terrain, and outdoor items from a library

Box Contents
Product CD;Manual; Free Tutorial CD

Customer Reviews

American software but works well
As others have said, this is designed for the US market where house design is different from the UK.

I bought the software to visualise a self-build project, and for the price it is definately worth it. I had the basic wall plans done within a few hours of opening the box, and with one command you can view the new house in 3D either from the outside, or from any camera point on the inside, or in a cutaway form with the roof lifted off. Making changes, moving walls around, changing fixtures, tinkering with door and window positions etc. is easy - something that if you had an architect doing the design would take weeks and which you'd never get the feeling that you got it "just right."

Having designed the layout of the house I can hand my final design to a draughtsman to draw proper metric plans for the builders.

The only frustrating aspect is that all the defaults are for the US market (colours of fabrics, styles of furniture, white goods etc.) but as long as you want to just get a view of what your new house will be like, and you don't try to "fight" the defaults to force it to be more British, this is a very easy to use package.

Until someone brings out a package designed for the UK market, I'd recommend you give this a go.

Works fine - no hangup and easy and fast to sketch the house
I tested the cheap old version - 3D Home Architect deluxe 3.0 just for getting a feeling of this kind of software.

I then spent quite some time looking around at the Internet at e.g. Punch, IMSI floorplan and finally chose to buy Better Homes and Gardens Home Designer Pro 6.
I chose the product because it is the actual upgrade to Home Architect and it is made by a company that also makes professional products - which in my mind makes them able to use theirs skills while making a stripped version from the professional product.

After getting the product my I could confirm that this is a professional home design product with very good documentation. And the program is easy to use and it very fast to draw a sketch of the house and later easy to adjust if needed.

No crashes and the 3D workes fine.

I have only tested the software om my new PC with 1GB RAM, Pentium 4 -3GHzHT and ATIRAdeon 128MB graphics - so I do not know yet whether it has good performance on my old PC.

I chose the Pro version (5 times more expensive) instead of the suite because I needed conversion from DXF and some of the other things that are extra in the Pro version - see the comparison matrix at the manufacturers site.

I think that if you don't need the extras - which I guess most people won't - then the suite is the right product for you!

/Jan

Not for the British market
This is purely American. If you're thinking of remodelling your home beware that this product uses standard US appliance sizes, and the design for homes refuses to go beyond three floors (I have a not untypical small house over four floors - all tiny rooms.) The pre-set designs have no similarity to British houses. I converted to their metric sizing and found these impossible to draw with any accuracy, so this is of no value in designing a tightly squeezed bathroom or kitchen. Also beware that they have virtually no return policy, since you have to return fed.ex or similar directly to the USA and this costs more than the product, despite never opening the packaging. I found it very akward to use, although if I studied the manual for a few weeks I might get better results, but it is certainly not user-friendly for the British market.