From painting the walls to choosing the furniture: eight useful apps for decorating a home
Mobile applications are already used to measure rooms, hang pictures straight and even to find inspiration.
At the same time as the home decoration market continues to grow, there is an abundance of applications that can be used to map rooms, choose furniture or the color of the walls and even hang pictures and shelves straight. Globe Live Media analyzes seven applications that use augmented reality and other technologies to facilitate users’ decision-making when improving the appearance of a home.
Measuring dimensions
If you don’t have a meter at hand, there are apps that use augmented reality to measure the dimensions of a room in a matter of seconds. This is the case of AR Plan 3D, available on the Play Store and the App Store. First, the user can choose between several measurements (millimeters, centimeters, meters, feet or yards); and then they can measure the wall, a door or a window and generate a 3D plan by scanning a room with the mobile camera. In tests conducted by this newspaper, the measurements taken by the app have been quite accurate.
The color of the walls
Bruguer Visualizer allows you to check in real time how any wall in your home would look painted in a different color. The operation of this application, available on the Play Store and the App Store, is very simple. Just point the camera at a wall and select a color from a palette with hundreds of options.
The app uses augmented reality and works best if the room is illuminated. The user can also use a “cutout tape” to see how a wall would look painted in two different colors (for example, one on the top and one on the bottom).
Choosing furniture
There are also apps that use augmented reality to help choose furniture. Ikea Place, available on the App Store, allows you to “virtually place full-scale 3D models in your own space and make them look like part of your world.” Simply choose one or more pieces of furniture from the Swedish company’s catalog and point the cell phone camera at a place to see how they look in it. If the user likes a product, he or she can add it to the wish list and buy it from the website.
Search for inspiration
There are apps like HomeByMe that suggest furniture from other brands. One of the strengths of this app, available in the App Store and Play Store, is that it serves to find design ideas from other people when decorating a home. The user can activate various filters depending on what they are looking for. For example, you can choose which room you want to decorate (the living room, kitchen, bedroom, dining room, bathroom or an office), the style (between art deco, bohemian, boho chic or coastal), the color and even the brands of furniture.
Hanging pictures straight
To hang pictures or any furniture straight on the wall, apps that simulate a spirit level (the measuring instrument used to determine whether a surface is level) are useful. Apps such as Bubble Level XXL, available on the App Store, or Bubble Level-Leveler, available on the Play Store, use the cell phone’s accelerometer and gyroscope to indicate the inclination of any object. It would be enough to place the mobile frame next to the side of a picture on the wall and make sure it is completely straight.
Contacting interior designers
In addition to showing images that serve as inspiration, Houzz stands out because it allows users to contact all kinds of experts: from architects to interior designers and decorators, including masons, specialists in kitchen and bathroom renovations or landscapers and garden designers. Users can select which service they need and where it is located, as well as read an expert’s reviews before contacting them.
The app, available on the App Store and Play Store, also has a section for asking experts for advice. While some users ask for ideas for remodeling facades, others ask if it makes sense to put built-in cabinets in a particular room, if it is a good idea to paint some walls dark gray or what is the best way to reform a kitchen from the 70s.
A home from scratch
While some apps help you choose furniture or see how walls look in a particular color, Home Design 3D goes a step further: it’s for designing a house from scratch or remodeling an existing one. “You can draw the rooms and adjust the height of the walls. Add one or more floors, doors, windows and even the roof to build an attic,” suggests the app, available for the App Store and Play Store.
Once the rooms have been created, the user can furnish and decorate them thanks to a catalog of 2,500 pieces of furniture, accessories and materials. The application allows you to remodel several existing projects for free and has different paid versions (priced from 6.99 euros) to create and export unlimited projects and have access to “thousands of objects and textures”.