Tech special: Your dream home is now just an app away

Home Design 3D, MyPantone, Homestyler Interior Design, Room Planner Home Design

Decorating your dream home on the advice of your interior decorator does not usually go well, mainly because there is a big difference between what how you and your interior decorator envisioned the final product. But here is the good news - there are apps that now help you to do everything from virtually decorate to rearrange the existing furniture, choose the colour of the wall paints, change the polish of the furniture to match the paint or vice a versa, bring down a wall or build one via your smarphone, before doing the actual deed.

ROOM PLANNER HOME DESIGN: (iOS)
Similar to the Homestyler, you can create a 3D version of your home in this app as well. You can simply drag and drop various room layouts from the library or draw your own room with the Room Sketch tool, bump the rooms with each other to make a complete floor, turn the walls invisible to see the shape of the floor as one, resize the dimensions of any room and even give names to the rooms, to make it more personal and realistic. One can even select the floor plan from the existing sample plans and change it to your liking. Once the plan is ready, you can put in the furniture, resize it to fit best in the room, choose appliances, door windows, cabinets, entertainment and so on to complete the look. You can even change the upholstery of the furniture or the material used for flooring from the library of paints, fabrics, countertops, stones and so on. Once the plans are ready, they can be exported to your desktop to add further details or create construction documents.

HOMESTYLER INTERIOR DESIGN: (iOS / Android)
You have the floor plan ready, now all you need to do is choose the furniture for each room. With this app, all you need to do is click a picture of the room, import it into the App and get decorating. You can try out various wall colours, décor items and furniture products from real brands that will be available in the market. The 3D model allows you to see how exactly the furniture will fit in the given space and once the room is set you can add light fixtures for the perfect room lighting. The room can be given final touches with rugs, paintings, mirrors and so on. You can also share the finished designs with your friends and family for their opinion. If you are on a quest for inspiration, you can also browse through the pictures uploaded by other users, seek advice from the how to section or simply like the work of other home designers like you.

MyPantone: (iOS / Android)
Colour combinations make or break a room and this is where MyPantone comes in. With access to over 13,000 colours, you can be sure to find that exact shade you dreamt of. You can create colour palettes depending on the effect you want the colour to have - warm, cool, dark and so on. Once the colour palette is ready, you can use AirPrint to print it out as reference of your painter. You can even click the picture of a colour you have liked and upload it to the app to find its closest match. The app even gives you the exact specifications of the colour you have chosen, in CMYK, so that you can be sure to get the right paint from the store.

HOME DESIGN 3D: (iOS)
Once you know what you want, you need to put it down on paper for the architect to build your dream home. This is where Home Design 3D comes in. The 2D version helps you design the floor plan of the complete house/office, put in walls and windows, increase or decrease their thickness or height by simply dragging/dropping, choose from among hundreds of objects and pieces of joinery proposed and change both the interior and exterior of your home. Or, you could simply import the design conceptualised by your architect and play around with it in the app and make the changes you desire. Once the final plan is ready; you can save it to your dropbox or share it with the professionals. You can upgrade to the 3D version to get a feel of the virtual house. You can even add colour and texture to the walls, by choosing from a library of over 450 different shades and the Day/Night function will let you see how your house lights up at different times of the day.

HOUZZ INTERIOR DESIGN IDEAS: (iOS / Android)
Before you start decorating your dream home, you need to be very clear about what you want it to look like. Houzz has the largest possible database of over 50 lakh high-resolution pictures of everything that you can think of in a home. The app is a collection of photos of nearly room, location and product. You can browse through the gallery in by ‘style', ‘location' or ‘room', expand the pictures you like and save them to your virtual idea book locally on your device - for offline access. Your idea book, in turn, can act as your guide at the time of design.