Chief Architect Home Designer Suite 10

by Chief Architect

• Professional home-design software for the serious do-it-yourself user
• Kitchens and baths, interior design, remodeling, decks and landscaping, and more
• Choose from built-in home style templates, create your own design, or use the House Wizard
• Design in 2D and 3D or both simultaneously; 6,000+ library items; cost estimating
• Get started quickly with easy how-to videos for step-by-step instructions

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B004348AEC
• Item Weight: 4.5 ounces
• Media: Software
• Release Date: October 5, 2010
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (44 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,199 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
  • #54 in Software > Home & Hobbies > Home & Garden Design

Product Description

Platform: PC

Amazon.com

Visualize what your home or remodeling project will look like. Home Designer Suite 10 provides advanced design tools for Home Design, Remodeling, Interior Design, Kitchens and Baths, Decks and Landscaping, and Cost Estimation. Save time and money and start designing today!

Professional tools for designing your dream home. View larger.

Home Design

Design or visualize your dream home with advanced design tools that are fun and easy to use.

• Choose from built-in home style templates, create your own custom home design or use the House Wizard
• Design in 2D and 3D or both simultaneously
• Choose from over 6,000 library items or download free bonus items to customize your design
• Choose from Final View, Glass House, Doll House, Night Views and Framing Cross-Sections / Elevations to see your design from every point of view
• Use powerful building tools like automatic roof generation, dormers, stairs, framing and foundations

Design a new room or build an addition. View larger.

Remodeling

Home Designer can help you plan, visualize, and estimate the costs before you begin your project! Create a new room or addition to your home, remodel your kitchen or bath, and visualize floor and space planning, using our home design software's powerful and easy building tools.

• Move a wall, change a color, add a room, redesign a kitchen and estimate the costs--all before you remodel
• Accurate move dimensions--move objects accurately by typing the dimension
• Create cross-sections for added details
• Change your colors, countertops, and flooring styles with Material Painter
• Add and remove walls, place windows and doors, size your rooms with furnishings and dimensions

Create a new look with advanced interior-design tools. View larger.

Interior Design

Give your home the look and feel you want--choose from thousands of styles, colors, wall coverings, flooring and materials. Design and decorate your living, dining, kitchen, kid's rooms or master bedroom. It's fun and it's easy!

• Place name brand products in your design including: Cultured Stone, Sherwin Williams, Benjamin Moore, Viking Appliances, and many others
• Smart Design Objects, Drag-and-drop from thousands of design objects in the built-in Library organized by category
• Choose from a variety of interior items--including chairs, tables, sofas, fabrics, accessories and more
• Design and decorating style ideas with inspirational photos by rooms
• Material Painter lets you apply colors and materials quickly and easily

Visualize a new kitchen or bath in 3D. View larger.

Kitchen and Bath Design

Creating your dream kitchen is fun and easy with Home Designer Suite. Create thousands of cabinet combinations, change your countertop material, add appliances and fixtures, create custom colors and materials, and more!

• Choose from over 1,000 cabinet combinations to create just about any custom kitchen or bath
• Find a variety of cabinets for base, wall, full height, angled, corner cabinets, partitions, shelves and soffits
• Choose from a wide variety appliance styles for your kitchen
• Choose from several floor types such as hardwood, stone, tile or carpeting
• Import your own favorite objects, materials, colors or textures from a photo or website
• Use the Color Blending tool to stain a translucent color or apply a solid color over the material you place to create unlimited combinations to fit your design requirements

From decks to landscaping, create well-planned outdoor living spaces. View larger.

Landscaping & Decks

Create beautiful landscapes, terrain features, gardens and decks for your perfect outdoor living spaces! Home Designer Suite makes it easy to quickly design the virtual look and feel of your backyard, deck, patio, pool or other outdoor project.

• Powerful deck and patio tools allow you to design and visualize your new deck with 3D models and can help you estimate the costs
• Design single or multi-level decks complete with automatic deck framing
• Use Automatic Build Terrain and Terrain Perimeter tools to create flat, irregular shaped or sloped lots--use a GPS to import or enter elevation data
• Choose from over 1,500 plants with the Plant Chooser
• Use the Plant Encyclopedia to learn more about the plants in your designs

Home Designer Product Comparison. View larger.

Get Started Quickly!

The Quick Startup Options Guide will help you begin with "How-To" tutorials based on the type of your project. You can also choose from over 30 easy "step-by-step" tutorial training videos that will quickly get you started on your next home design project. Live online training webinars are available on a weekly basis and you can access this training via the Internet. Home Talk is a User Forum you can ask question from the community of users. Finally we offer great technical support by qualified in-house professionals.

Product Description

Chief Architect S100-11-D home designer Suite 10

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

75 of 76 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Much better than Punch December 3, 2010

By KickSaveDave

Platform for Display:PC

I figured if you're going to spend several hundred thousand on a new house, why not buy a few different design programs to really see which one works best for you. I had owned Punch about 3 years ago and it was really un-intuitive, items were easily placed on the wrong floors, you had to manually enter the elevation of each item, hard to build the basic things like basements, stairs were painful. But I figured I'd try a newer version, so I downloaded Punch Home Design and Landscape V2 (NextGen) and gave it a try. Same stuff, kludgy to use, difficult to get good views in 3D mode, to adjust the camera angles.

So I downloaded Chief Architect Home Designed Suite 10 as well, and its a far easier, more intuitive, more flexible product. When viewing a floor, you place an item, and it attaches to that floor - no need to manually adjust the items elevation above a reference point. When you want to move up to the 2nd floor, to click "2nd floor" and now your items, modifications, etc, are all done on the 2nd floor, simple. Flying the camera around the 3D view is straight forward, just drag your mouse. If you make changes to your floor plan, just click "auto generate roof" again and it will adjust the roof to match your changes. There is a ton of objects that you can place like dishwasher, fireplace, furniture, etc, and you can grab more off the web if you want something not already in the package.

All in all after using both the Punch and the Chief Architect, I like using this one much more. I've got an entire house complete in a few days with this. For the price of the download on Amazon, under $100, this is a good value.

56 of 60 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars See my review of Home Designer Pro for tips on learning December 2, 2010

By J. Lewis

Platform for Display:PC

I own and have rated Home Designer Pro v10 5 stars. Chief Architect Home Designer Pro 10 Most people probably don't need the Pro version to try out redecorating or remodeling their home a bit in 3D. However, if you are interested in this product and are wondering how it works, there is no better way to find out than to download the 30-day free trial from the HomeDesignerSoftware.com website and try it out using the excellent video tutorials on the web site. Each tutorial tells you what version of the software the features in the tutorial apply to, Essentials vs Suite vs Architectural vs Pro.

I highly recommend Home Designer. The basic features in the Essentials and the Suite are pretty much the same as in the Pro version. Unfortunately, there is no free trial of anything but the Pro version. Wait carefully for the free trial offer to pop up in the home page web show or browse to the Pro product page and look for the trial download offer currently on the right center side of the page. If you're creating plans from scratch, get yourself a laser measuring device like the one I got Bosch DLR130K Digital Distance Measurer Kit, measures down to a few inches and accurate to ~1/16th of an inch up to 130 ft. Enhancing googles help on bright light or poorly reflecting surfaces Bosch DLA001 Laser View-Enhancing Glasses.

The Suite is probably the sweet spot (pun intended) between price and features and you can upgrade to the Architectural or the Pro thru the HomeDesigner web site at discount. It's fun and addictive.... Google Sketchup is also a useful free tool that can be helpful, too. Read my Pro version review (link above) to learn more.

P.S. One of the best reasons for trying the trial version is to make sure you won't be caught short on needed features in the version you decide to get. Here is a link to a detailed matrix of the capabilities of each version. [...](EDIT:since Amazon deletes links, see Comparison Matrix, lower left HomeDesigner site-scroll thru list). Some of the details may not mean much to you until you try the trial version with the tutorials. But for example, I got the Pro version because I have a complicated roof and I wanted complete manual control over roof design. Read more ›

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Finishing the Basement November 29, 2010

By Hammer Man

Platform for Display:PC|Amazon Verified Purchase

The product works as expected. I have used similar product in the past but it was about 10 years ago. The product worked well, I am using it to show different layout concepts of our unfinished basement to my wife. In my opinion the library of objects is one of the biggest assets. Most programs can draw the walls and doors but dropping all the other items in to create a good 3D view requires a lot of library items, that's what save a lot of time.

30 of 34 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Apparently a layout tool and not for making building plans. April 26, 2011

By T. Hartley

Platform for Display:PC|Amazon Verified Purchase

Update below:

I waited a few days before I wrote this review to make sure I wasn't jumping the gun. I've spent time with the software trying to determine if there was something I'd missed in the "tutorials" or documentation.

I've built several buildings in my life. I helped my dad build our house and a 40/30 utility building. We built the trusses ourselves. I'm trying to say, I've built stuff. I'm not a contractor, but I've built a lot of stuff, and I've worked in construction.

All this being said, I bought this software to help me design a small building on my lot. My neighborhood has a covenant and obviously my city has building codes. I was hoping to have a tool to help me make a basic design. I wanted to print out a basic framing model, and maybe a few elevation pictures. I could present these to the local building authority for permits and such.

This is totally inadequate for my purposes. What were the previous reviewers' objectives? I suspect not a "blue print" type of design. Maybe it's good for someone who just wants to think things through, to show their architect pictures and ideas for the basis of a discussion.

I've spend hours trying to use it to build a simple building. I've watched the tutorials online. I'm not a normal software user either. I write software for a living. I write software used to design factory automation systems, I'm not a stranger to using software.

In my memory this is the worst piece of software I've ever bought. I didn't expect too much for a $100, but I can't think of many things I've been less pleased in purchasing. It doesn't crash or something like that. It's just very hard to use, and it doesn't do very much. The user interface is terrible.... If you could "customize" a great deal of things then the kludge of a user interface could be forgiven, but it's bad without power. I'm having a hard time explaining why it's so terribly bad. The camera renders the design in a skewed fashion. The control for changing view angles is bad, and that's once you managed to get anything into the software.

I would suggest you watch the sales pitch, uh tutorials and ask yourself this basic question. "What if I wanted to do... this instead of the canned behavior you're showing me?" The tutorials put the product in it's best light. They are very well crafted to keep you from seeing the horrible flaws in the software. The customization support is severely lacking. I'm only trying to build a utility shed to house my mowing equipment. I can't image trying to actually build a house with this product. That would be a total nightmare.

I've already bought the farm and opened the package. I am glad that I'm only out a $100 bucks. I'd send it back if possible.

I don't know if Punch or Home and Garden are any better, but I find it hard to be believe it could be much worse.

Save your money, don't buy this product. If you do after reading this, don't say you were not warned.

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Well after more research, it's obvious that what I'm trying to do with this software is not what it was meant to do. I'm updating my review to reflect this information. Like my new title says it's for layout and "design" not for building plans. Read more ›