A Design Tool That's Quick, Easy and … Inadequate
It can sometimes be hard to buy furniture without knowing how it will fit into a room, so I (KH) thought it would be useful to introduce our customers to a quick tool for inserting furniture footprints into a scale drawing of a room. Huge companies such as Pottery Barn that sell mass-produced furniture online now have tools that let you draw your room dimensions, then insert two-dimensional outlines of their furniture to get a basic idea of how their products might fit your space. This article reports the initial results of my quest to figure out how Cherry Gallery could adapt such a tool to assist buyers of unique antique furniture.
Fortuitously, we are completing renovations on an old (original portions built circa 1800, with major 1890s additions) house, and are nearly ready to furnish the final room that was gutted and refurbished over the past several months. This room provides our real-life case study for testing online tools for drawing a floor plan and experimenting with adding furniture to scale. My two main criteria were that the tool be free (not requiring purchased software), and so friendly that drawing the initial room outline on a computer screen would take no more time than it would to draw it on a piece of graph paper.
That quick-and-easy criterion pretty much ruled out using 3-D design tools, even though there are some good ones available online for free. When designing our kitchen a few years ago, I was inspired by a 3-D rendering our brother-in-law had made of their kitchen plan using free but powerful modeling software called SketchUp. I saw his rendering while visiting the completed kitchen in their new house, and was impressed by how well his plan evoked the actual space I was standing in.
Kitchen plan from Sketchup's sample renderings
Deck plan from Sketchup's sample renderings
So I diligently set about trying to use SketchUp to transform our mental images of a new kitchen into a snazzy architectural rendering. Suffice it to say that I flunked my self-taught course in SketchUp, being impatient to produce a product rather than master a process. I resorted to making a 2-D floor plan on graph paper to give to our cabinet maker who then created elevations.
While a 3-D plan would have been quite useful for designing a kitchen, it is less necessary for figuring out how furniture of various shapes and sizes will fit in a room. Unfortunately, nine of the ten free room layout software tools I tried online produced 3-D designs. The sketching tools in those programs were not intuitive to use, and in some cases were downright cumbersome, so I quickly moved on to the tenth choice – Better Homes & Gardens’ (BHG) “Arrange-a-Room” tool.
I liked that this tool was only about as fancy as virtual graph paper, and so it took just a minute to outline a room and drag and drop in footprints of furniture sized to my specs. But a snag emerged when I tried to input the real dimensions of our room, which is 34’ x 14’. When I tried to stretch the outside wall to 34’, the line disappeared off the screen. The sketching workspace is miniscule because the site dedicates a third of the screen space to ads (this is the price you pay for free software), and another huge chunk of the screen is occupied by a list of instructions and menu items that you can’t minimize. So once I lost the boundary line, it was useless to go any further with creating the floor plan of our actual room.
I did persevere however, thinking the tool might still be useful for planning smaller rooms. I created the general shape of our room, using smaller dimensions. The outline shown below reflects a bump-out for bow windows at the top, and a bump-in for the fireplace at the bottom. I couldn’t easily add breaks in the outline for the doors and windows, but that wasn’t as important as just having a scale outline of the space where I could place furniture footprints.
I grabbed a sofa, coffee table and two club chairs from the list of furniture templates and dropped them into the room. Since the whole drawing was out of scale anyway, I shrunk the furniture until it looked right in the space, ending with Lilliputian dimensions such as a 36” long sofa. So much for that part of the experiment!
Another frustration with using the tool was that although I had created and logged into a BHG website account, then pressed “Save this Plan,” it did not save it anywhere where I could find it on subsequent log-ins. Did the software designers assume users would plan the furnishings for an entire room in one session? Then I tried the “Email to a Friend” button, but the plan never turned up in the In-Box to which it was sent. Strike four.
Needless to say, I decided that this was not a tool I would recommend to customers, so went no further with the exercise. I have since read reviews of various room design apps for mobile devices that might be more useful, although most of them only insert stock furniture products of set dimensions available from certain commercial companies. If I do find anything that is worth recommending to potential buyers of one-of-a-kind antique pieces who want to quickly test the furniture footprints in a room layout, I will write about it in a future post. Meanwhile, my assessment of the free Better Homes & Gardens' room layout tool is that it is a good manifestation of the old adage: You get what you pay for.
