You can design your own house from scratch or save time by starting with one of SmartDraw's many built-in house plans. SmartDraw has templates for a variety of contemporary and modern home plans with different bedroom and bathroom combinations. You can start your dream home using a contemporary ranch-style home plan, a barndominium, or a more traditional Colonial home.
You'll get thousands of ready-made symbols for everything you need to design your home: furniture for every room in the house from your living room to your bedroom, kitchen appliances, bathroom fixtures, lighting, cabinets, plants, and more! SmartDraw also includes many photo-realistic textures for flooring, cabinets, and landscapes that can take your design to the next level.
SmartDraw also has contractor-grade symbols for wiring, plumbing, HVAC, and security systems. You can create a complete 2D plan you can hand off to your contractor with confidence.
Design your dream home by easily dragging and dropping new elements like doors, windows, appliances, fixtures, and furniture.
SmartDraw also has built-in templates to help you visualize the outside of your house. Create an elevation plan of your home to visualize color, siding type, roofing material, trim, and other finishes and textures. Make sure the outside of your home matches your vision in style and proportion.
SmartDraw works hand in glove with your existing AI workflow whether you prefer ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or something else. Use your AI to generate ideas for layouts, provide inspiration for interior design styles, and create mood boards for design and then easily add any generated images to SmartDraw to enhance your project.
Export your house plan and ask AI to offer suggestions for improved space utilization and flow you can easily implement in SmartDraw.
SmartDraw is easy to work with no matter what other apps you use. You can add home designs to:
Unlike other apps, SmartDraw doesn't force you to save files to its own cloud unless that's what you choose. You can keep full control of your data by saving files directly to your existing provider. You can save your house designs directly to:
Share your home design with anyone, even if they don't own a copy of SmartDraw, with a link.
You can also easily export any diagram as a PDF or common image formats like PNG or SVG.
Have a question? Chat or email us. SmartDraw support is in-house and free!
Collaborate on your new home design with your team and get feedback from your friends, family, or clients.
You can work on the same design in real time or leave comments to offer suggestions or communicate approval.
SmartDraw also works where you already communicate with others. You can collaborate on a house design in Microsoft Teams®, Slack or Confluence.
SmartDraw includes dozens of house design examples and templates to help you get started. You'll never be stuck staring at a blank page.
Determine how many bedrooms and bathrooms you want to have including any additional must-have spaces like a den, home office, or game room. Consider your lifestyle needs and accessibility constraints. For example, do you want a master bedroom upstairs or downstairs in a 2 story house? Do you want to include a guest space or an in-law suite?
Save photos from social media or generate mood board images using an LLM like ChatGPT. Review HOA constraints and neighborhood guidelines and make sure you're aware of local zoning and building code regulations.
Are you remodeling an existing home? Start by measuring your walls including the placement of your doors and windows.
Are you creating a plan for new development? You'll still want to collect measurements for your lot boundaries, slopes, and any existing structures or features you'll need to design around.
Choose a house plan template that best fits your project. SmartDraw has lots of common popular layouts for contemporary homes.
Create an outline by adding walls for each room of the building.
SmartDraw makes it easy to drag walls to adjust them or just type the length directly into walls to modify them. Once you've created an outline for your room or house, click on a wall and you'll see two types of growth handles appear. The handle with an up and down or right to left arrow will allow you to move your wall inward or outward vertically or horizontally. The handle at the corners where walls meet will help you adjust your wall diagonally by letting you move the placement of the corner.
Begin by adding unchangeable architectural features like the doors and windows. Next, place important appliances like the refrigerator, dishwasher, washer and dryer that must be placed in a specific location.
Last, add furniture like beds, tables, sofas, desks, equipment, chairs and so on.
Invite clients or family to give you feedback and work on your home design in real-time. Make notes or even make changes on the fly as a group. SmartDraw is so easy to use, you can make changes in real-time.
Once your house plan is complete you can insert it directly to any Microsoft Office app like Microsoft Word® or PowerPoint®, or add it to Google Docs™ or Google Slides™.
You can also easily export your floor plan as a PDF or print it.
AI tools and LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude are great for generating designs in the early stages of planning for inspiration. However, the images they produce are not editable and not to scale. We recommend using LLMs alongside a tool like SmartDraw's home design software. This gives you the best of both worlds. You can translate a text prompt into an inspirational image and use SmartDraw to create a precise scaled drawing you can hand off to a contractor.
SmartDraw lets you draw scaled drawings like house plans with ease. You can start with built-in home design templates, drag-and-drop symbols, and save your home design to any platform. You get all the power of AutoCAD at a fraction of the cost. Learn more about our AutoCAD alternative.
If you have an existing blueprint of your home, you can import it as a PDF and make it a background image you can trace over or use it to add notes or even scaled symbols.
With SmartDraw, you can change the scale of any drawing at any time. You can flip between standard and metric scales at will. You can also define your own scale if it is not among the standard scales offered.
SmartDraw's home design software is free to try. You can easily design your house in just a few days using built-in templates and symbols.
You can easily import photos to create texture or add more detail to any design. You can even import an image of an existing floor plan if you want to draw over it in more detail or make notes to share with your team.
SmartDraw gives you the freedom to create home designs from any device. You'll get templates for:
Once you select a template, you can drag and drop symbols, move walls, or add windows and doors to customize your design.
Discover why SmartDraw is the easiest house design software.