![]() Physically building a small-scale model of what you design might seem like overkill, but if you're into miniatures, pick up Home Design Complete from Punch Software. It's fun to take established ideas and tweak them to your needs. You can choose from a 1,700-square-foot colonial to a 7,200-square-foot, five-bedroom Tudor mansion with a circular staircase housed inside a turret. The beauty of this package is not in its interface, which I found to be a little cumbersome, but the library of 500 professionally designed floor plans. If you agree that good artists borrow, but great artists steal, then you will appreciate Planix Complete Home Suite from Autodesk. The catalogue includes dimensions and product features as well as company contact information. Photographs pop up on your computer screen of everything from top-of-the-line Viking gas stoves and Sub Zero refrigerators to American Standard and Kohler plumbing fixtures. A real bonus, however, is the electronic catalogue of more than 20,000 appliances you can browse through. I wouldn't call it photo quality, but it is noticeably better. Users get what Broderbund calls "photo-quality imaging" added to the 3D views to make the interiors appear more realistic. Appliances look like rejects from some cheesy dollhouse, and you can't paint the wall different colors or add wallpaper.įor a more impressive look and feel, try Broderbund's new Total 3D Home Deluxe. The downside is that the 3D view is not very impressive to gaze at. Simply playing with the program for an hour was enough to get me started. The beauty of 3D Home Architect Deluxe is the simplicity of the interface. 3D Home Architect Deluxe also makes it easy to insert standard appliances, such as water heaters, stoves, dishwashers and toilets, from a library of some 400 standard devices. ![]() Like most of the products on the market today, users can view their creations in 3D and "walk through" a plan to get a somewhat realistic feel for the layout. The feature I liked best was the nifty "Plan Check," which analyzes your drawing and gives you advice about how to improve your plan and make sure you adhere to standard building codes. Inserting doorways and windows is done with a click of the mouse and you can customize the size of each. From there it was simply a matter of working within the confines of what is essentially a huge rectangle to add the rooms we wanted. I started my design by measuring the interior dimensions of our loft and then plugged the values into the program. Like all home-design software, users select from a toolbar of icons to perform various tasks such as erecting walls and inserting windows and doors. While it contains just one CD-ROM, this is the most popular home-design system, and it's perfect for doing architectural renderings of a loft or a mansion. My CD of choice was the 3D Home Architect Deluxe from Broderbund Software. Most software even estimates building expenses. Today there is a variety of excellent software titles out there that are easy to use and that allow the layman to design anything from a kitchen or bathroom addition to a complete house. ![]() Even professional architects use computers and sophisticated programs like Autocad to create blueprints. An architect friend of mine and I scribbled designs on paper trying different floor plans before it occurred to me that this was a waste of time. This plan slowly grew to include (her) walk-in closet, (her) pantry and (her) laundry room. We decided we wanted to keep the space open and build just the basics-a kitchen, bedroom and bathroom. But if the "art of civilization is the act of drawing lines," as Oliver Wendell Holmes once noted, then we would need a hell of a lot of lines. All we needed was a little vision, we were told, and we would be living like derivatives traders. ![]() What this former Chinese sweatshop had going for it was size-some 2,500 square feet-and the price was right. Only in New York are caged-in residents driven to regard such a dump as a diamond in the rough.
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