This two-CD set is loaded with five separate programs. Sierra Home Architect will help you design and decorate your dream home in 3D. Photo Home Interiors lets you import photos of your own home to experiment with. With Interior Design Collection you can draw inspiration from designer homes. Designer Rooms Library is where you can call on a collection of professionally designed floor plans. And, finally, Home Design Guide is a type of tutorial to lend a helping hand.
Having previously used Custom LandDesigner 6 (reviewed issue 40, page 90), I fully expected to be able to find my way around without any problems and although the layouts and commands are all typically Sierra, I could not for the life of me manage to do up my own floor plans without considerable effort. Was it just my lack of coordination or not enough brain cells? Who knows. If anyone from Sierra reads this, please put some time and effort into making the whole process simpler when updating this version.
Luckily, Sierra has thrown in hundreds of ready-made floor plans as templates. With only a few adjustments and additions, the results can be very pleasing. My masterpiece started as a standard two-storey, four-bedroom house, but with the addition of a games room, sauna and dungeon, it felt just like home.
To completely master this program would take quite a while, but from what I have seen its well worth the effort. Part of the difficulty lies in some of the illogical nature of the menu system. The opening menu lists Starting With A Blank Design, Getting Started, Open Designer Rooms Library and Open Most Recent Design in that order. The choices will not directly correspond with
any of the applications, so it's a bit tricky at times navigating from one point of the program to another.
The saving grace is an easy-to-follow manual and a comprehensive tutorial. Detailed video clips are included to help you get through some of the more trickier tasks such as working with 2D and 3D objects, texturing and colouring areas, importing custom objects and customising your own textures. Once you have completed your basic house design and laid out dimensions, go straight to the Designer Rooms Library section. Scan in a photo of a room in your home as the background image, overlay the required furniture, then move it around until it looks just right. Change existing floor surfaces, experiment with wall colours and even adjust lighting to create various effects.
This program is definitely not for everybody but if you own a home and are planning to burn some cash, this is well worth the time and cost involved. Then some work could be done on the interface.