Transforming a living space into a reflection of personal style and comfort required endless magazine flipping, showroom visits, and, often, the expensive help of an interior designer. Today, your smartphone can be a potent tool in your home decor arsenal. From visualising furniture in your room to discovering new design ideas and managing your redecoration projects, many innovative apps make home styling more accessible, affordable, and fun. Below are five popular home decor apps to help you plan, redesign, visualise and execute your home project.
Houzz is often considered the undisputed king of home design apps, serving as a comprehensive platform for inspiration and execution. Its core strength lies in its enormous database of millions of high-resolution photos of homes, searchable by style, room, and location. Users can save favourite photos to “Ideabooks” for future reference. Beyond inspiration, Houzz connects users with local professionals (designers, contractors, architects), offers a marketplace to buy furniture and decor, and even features a “View in My Room 3D” tool. This augmented reality (AR) feature lets you virtually place products from their marketplace into your actual space using your phone’s camera, helping you visualise how an item will look and fit before buying. It’s an invaluable resource for everything from a simple refresh to a full-scale renovation. This way, you can build whatever you want, including a mini gaming hub for your sessions at King Johnnie real money online pokies or any other platforms.
The IKEA Place app (now integrated mainly into IKEA Kreativ in some regions) is a game-changer for anyone considering IKEA furniture. Leveraging augmented reality technology, this app allows you to virtually “place” IKEA products, from sofas and tables to lamps and shelving units, directly into your room using your smartphone’s camera. If they fit the space, you can see how items look and experiment with different layouts and colours, all in real time. This eliminates much of the guesswork associated with furniture shopping and helps prevent costly mistakes by ensuring items are the right size and style for your space before you commit to a purchase. It’s a convenient tool for pre-visualising furniture arrangements.
While not exclusively a home decor app, Pinterest is an indispensable tool for anyone seeking visual inspiration for their home. It is a massive digital scrapbooking platform where users can “pin” images and ideas from across the web onto customisable boards. For home decor, this means endless possibilities: create boards for “Living Room Ideas,” “Dream Kitchen,” “Bohemian Bedroom,” or “DIY Projects.” Pinterest’s powerful search and recommendation engine will constantly feed you new ideas based on your interests, making it easy to discover trends, colour palettes, furniture styles, and decor arrangements. It’s perfect for gathering ideas, defining your aesthetic, and serving as a visual mood board for your design projects.
Choosing the right paint colour can be daunting, with endless swatches and the challenge of imagining how a tiny chip will look on an entire wall. This process is simplified by apps like Sherwin-Williams’ ColorSnap (or Dulux Visualizer, Benjamin Moore Color Portfolio). These apps allow you to virtually “paint” your walls using your phone’s camera. You can select a paint colour from their extensive palettes, and the app uses augmented reality to instantly apply that colour to the walls in your live view, allowing you to see how it looks in your actual lighting and with your existing furniture. Some apps even let you upload a photo of a colour you like from anywhere and find its closest paint match. These tools are invaluable for making confident paint colour decisions.
Apps like Room Planner or Planner 5D offer robust 2D and 3D floor planning capabilities for those who want to get serious about space planning and virtual design. Users can create detailed floor plans of their rooms from scratch or import existing ones. Once the layout is set, you can virtually furnish and decorate the space with a vast library of furniture, fixtures, and decor items, experimenting with different arrangements, colours, and styles. These apps provide a realistic 3D walk-through view, allowing you to visualise your design concepts in detail before making any physical changes. They are handy for planning renovations, rearranging furniture, or sketching out new home designs with precision.