Better Homes and Gardens Home Designer Suite 8.0 has been replaced by Chief Architect Home Designer Suite 9.0, but is still widely available for purchase online.
What Can You Do With the Home Designer Suite?
- View more than 1,500 sample plans
- View photo galleries with design advice
- Draw floor plans
- Design houses, rooms, decks, kitchens, bathrooms, terrains, and landscapes
- Import a photo of your home and add landscape features
- Create 2D and 3D images
- View houses and rooms from many perspectives
- Arrange furniture and plan interior decoration
- Choose from an extensive menu of options for siding materials, landscape plants, cabinets, appliances, furnishings, and other features
- Download images of name-brand products from the Web
- Match colors from any paint manufacturer
- Add labels to your designs
- Estimate building costs
- Calculate mortgage loans
- Modify and save your plans
- View online galleries of projects by other users
What CAN'T You Do With the Home Designer Suite?
Better & Homes Gardens Home Designer Suite includes CAD tools that will let you create professional-looking designs. Keep in mind, however, that the software is geared mainly for non-professionals. Here are some things the Home Designer Suite will NOT help you do:- Add voice and sounds to your designs
- Create animated views of your project
- Design complex mechanical and HVAC systems
- Check your design against national building codes
How Easy is the Home Designer Suite?
The program DVDs for Better Homes & Gardens Home Designer Suite installed easily in about 10 minutes. This software is not for the impatient, however. Once I opened the Home Designer Suite, I faced a staggering range of commands and options. Where to begin?Designing a house with the Home Designer Suite begins with choosing a house style from a short list of options such as Colonial or Arts & Crafts. The house style selection establishes a series of default values for design features and architectural details.
The next steps toward creating a home design involve drawing walls and mouse-clicking to add windows, doors, cabinets, and appliances. Literally hundreds of options can make this process baffling. Fortunately, the Home Designer Suite comes with tutorial videos bundled into the software. Better Homes & Gardens also offers free online technical support.
The Bottom Line
The Better Homes & Gardens Home Designer Suite has the power to create home and landscape designs with remarkable detail. The design libraries and huge library of sample floor plans are a plus. However, unless you are familiar with graphics software, plan to spend hours with the training videos before you are able to finish your first design.
System Requirements
- Windows® XP or Vista
- 1.2 GHz or higher processor
- 2 GB free hard drive space
- 1 GB RAM
- DVD drive
Better Homes & Gardens offers a variety of home design software packages. The Home Designer Suite reviewed here can usually be purchased for about $100. To find the best deal, click the "compare prices" button below.
