Several AI platforms have emerged that help you lay out rooms. We put them to the test
It's a sign of the fast pace of modern times that these days, creating a Pinterest board of room decor inspiration and emailing its link to your partner/designer/tradesperson seems clunky and old-fashioned. Once it was the easiest way to develop and share your plans for a renovation, but it has now been superseded by a raft of new AI solutions, from pure AI (headline-grabbing programs such ChatGPT, which generate content from almost nothing, to varying degrees of success) to "soft AI", which relies on coding and some human intervention, generally giving a more satisfactory result.
For the advanced stages of a professional project, interior designers find it useful to commission tech wizards who use pure AI to conjure up lifelike room sets that are almost indistinguishable from the real thing, the high cost of which can be folded into the client's fee. But for the homeowner, soft AI is much more navigable, cheaper and faster to use, being far simpler to get to grips with and employ successfully.
It bridges the gap between the amateur renovator and the tradespeople who will be carrying out the work, guiding you through all your design choices, and prompting you to think about the parts of a refurb that would almost certainly never occur to you - a bathroom sink's trap pipe, perhaps. It also allows you to coordinate, collate and collaborate with others on plans in the digital sphere for what you'll do at home. Who needs a paint swatch when you can autofill a colour? Who needs to brief a plumber when your renovation program can translate your visual dreams into tradie-speak? The future is here, and as this pick of the best six platforms shows, it means refurbs have never been easier.
Reno
Reno, which launched earlier this year, is a nifty planning and design tool to guide you through your key decisions. It asks you questions both big and small, from the size of your room to what sort of edging you might want for your tiles, and then turns this into an easy-to-play-around-with floor plan that you can jiggle with to your heart's content, toggling between bird's-eye and elevated views.
It also takes your requirements and folds them into a detailed and specific brief that tradespeople can work from to give you realistic quotes. It's particularly useful when it comes to kitchens and bathrooms, but can be used for every room in the house. A partnership with paint brand COAT allows you to flow a palette of paint colours into your floor plans with nothing more than a click of a button, with both mobile and desktop-enabled functions. From £60 for 12 months' access.
Peek Home
With fans including the likes of Kirstie Allsopp and Phil Spencer (this tool has been featured on their TV show Love It or List It), Peek Home comes property-professional approved. It does the hard work for you - you input all the relevant details such as your size specifications and what you're trying to achieve, and within three days it will send full 3D plans back to you.
These come with walk-through videos, just like you see when Kevin McCloud is explaining an amateur renovator's vision near the start of every Grand Designs episode. It's not as quick to use as many other programs, but it's very thorough and very slick - brilliant if you're undertaking a build or reconfiguration and you want the skill of an architect without the price tag. From £249 per drawing.
Resi
This extension visualisation platform helps you plan designs, but also allows you to be nosy: it cleverly knows what all your neighbours have done to their houses, and so what you're likely to get permission to do to yours. You can use it to design your own 3D extension in less than 30 seconds - yes, really - but it's only about as detailed as that time frame might suggest.
Where it's most useful is in the initial planning stages, as its online calculator will give you a fairly exact estimate of how much the sort of addition you want to make will cost. It will also guide you as to how much value you're likely to add, and give you advice on remortgaging and energy efficiency. Free to use.
Mattoboard
Built for designers, but available for homeowners, this is for people who are serious about their room decor. It enables you to fashion 3D flat lays that group together swatches of materials - marbles with metals, say, or fabrics with fixtures - using AI to make the pieces you choose look as realistic as if they were right in front of you.
Because it's built for professionals it does take a little practice to get this perfect, but in the planning and visualisation stage its results are flawless, even allowing you to be able to see how those materials might look in different lights, and to gauge what exact colour matches look like when placed near each other. Free to use, or £12 per month for Mattoboard Pro, with more technical features and unlimited choice of materials.
Live Home 3D
Make like an architect and whip up incredibly detailed 3D room renderings with this intuitive platform. It's remarkably easy to use: you can scan your room with your smartphone and it'll devise a floorplan for you immediately, using a laser to determine the measurements accurately. The results are very impressive drawings of rooms you can hand over to a professional to create in the real world, and that you can tinker with yourself until you find a space that works for how you want to live.
With the ability to design interiors, exteriors and gardens, it also has a neat augmented reality function whereby - should you be going very big on your project planning - you can hold your iPad up to your plot of land and see your future home appear in situ. From around £50 for a lifetime licence.
Planoplan
Planoplan starts with a caveat: a professional designer will need a few hours to truly get to grips with this platform. But that's not to say you can't start playing around with it right away, building floor plans in PDF form that it then turns into quite beautiful 3D models. The options are extremely detailed - you can play around with lighting plans, for example - and perhaps more than the average home decorator will need.
But at around £10 per month, this is so much cheaper than an interior designer would be (they often command around 20 per cent of the overall renovation budget), and so if you're aiming to do a whole house yourself then this is the program for you. Monthly subscription from around £10.
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