HGTV Home Design & Remodeling Suite

by Nova Development Corp

Product Features

• Build a Green Kitchen—HGTV will help you plan and visualize a new, updated kitchen, complete with new, more energy-efficient appliances
• Wizard-driven interface makes any project easy, plus HGTV How-To Video Tips and a printed user guide to get you started
• Photorealistic 3D Technology with virtual walkaround and thousands of 3D appliances, furniture, lighting and more
• Easy room makeovers--start with your own digital picture
• Includes free technical support

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B001HWLCQ6
• Item model number: DJWT
• Date first available at Amazon.com: November 13, 2008
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (82 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,553 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
  • #25 in Software > Home & Hobbies > Home Design

Product Description

Amazon.com

Design Your Dream Home with Help from HGTV, the No. 1 home improvement television network. Take a fresh approach to the way you live, including building a green kitchen, with HGTV Home Design & Remodeling Suite.

Design Your Dream Home with Help from HGTV.

Easily draw out your room. Then choose materials and furnishings just by dragging and dropping. Click to enlarge.

Perfect for creating a new living space. Click to enlarge.

All the tools for creating winning kitchens & baths. Click to enlarge.

Are you looking to update a living room, bedroom or other space but aren't really sure where to begin? HGTV Home Design & Remodeling Suite makes the process a cinch. Easily draw out your room. Then choose materials and furnishings just by dragging and dropping.

This new software is perfect for creating a new living space; adding a fireplace; making your home energy efficient with new appliances; replacing countertops, cabinetry and fixtures; and enhancing any room in your house with a brand new look. You can import digital photos of your home's exterior or interior and instantly change paint colors. You can even design your dream home from scratch.

And it's easier than ever--no design experience necessary! Just point and click!

• Room Makeovers
• Interior Design and Remodels
• HGTV How-To Video Library
• Kitchens & Baths
• Landscaping & Tools
• Home Design
• Cost Estimating

Get Professional Tips from HGTV's Video Library and a printed user guide to get you started and keep your creativity flowing. A variety of important topics are included, all to ensure your home improvement project turns out just as you dreamt it! Subjects include:

• Interior Paint Finishings
• Improving Your Kitchen
• Artistic Backsplashes
• Framing Windows
• Carpets
• Mold Prevention Methods
• And Much More

Easy Room Makeovers with multiple options--or you can start with your own digital pictures. Import digital photos of home furnishings--or family photos--into your one-of-a-kind design!

Create virtual tours to visualize your finished living space before you ever start your project. Click to enlarge.

HGTV Home Design & Remodeling software makes it easy to design the kitchen of your dreams. Click to enlarge.

Hundreds of 3D Appliances, Furnishings, Lighting and More! Customize your space by selecting countertops, furniture and appliances in every style imaginable. Everything you need to plan, design, customize and create.

HGTV Home Design & Remodeling software makes it easy to design the kitchen of your dreams. Easily refinish cabinets, replace countertops, update appliances, and more. Even add decorative hoods and backsplashes and more functional eating areas.

Plan Your HGTV Green Kitchen. Kitchens are the energy hog of the home. Between refrigerators and the ovens, cooktops and dishwashers, microwaves and small appliances, it's easy to see how a kitchen can cook up most of your energy bill. HGTV Home Design & Remodeling software will help you to plan and visualize a ne, updated kitchen, complete with new, more energy-efficient appliances.

Wizard-Driven Interface makes any project fast and easy. There's even free tech support!

Photorealistic 3D Technology for unparalleled visualization capacity. 3D Real View makes it possible to conduct your own virtual walkaround.

Sample Home Plans for a fast start and virtually limitless creative options and innovations. Create your own floorplan in minutes or, create your own door and window styles, cabinets, lighting and window coverings. Build in everything from electrical outlets and switches to home networking and theatre systems. Plus: automatic roof placement, complete HVAC and plumbing, easy material selection--brick, stone, siding--and more.*

Landscaping Tools
Choose from hundreds of plants, fences, gates and more to plan beautiful, functional landscapes.

Plan and visualize a new, updated kitchen, complete with new, more energy-efficient appliances.

It's easy to plan even the most challenging project. Click to enlarge.

The changes you make in 3D are simultaneously made to your 2D plan--automatically. Click to enlarge.

Hundreds of 3D models to choose from. Click to enlarge.

Summary of Features for Makeovers and Remodeling

Flexible Interior Design Features

• Replace Paint and Fabric:
  Take a digital picture of any room and visualize your new space.
  
  
• Flooring Materials Library:
  Woods, tiles, carpets and more
  
  
• Countertops Library, including granites and marbles
  
  
• Brand Name Content and Materials
  
  
• Complete Furniture & Appliance Library:
  Hundreds of 3D models to choose from
  

Realistic Visualization Features

• Design in Photorealistic 3D:
  The changes you make in 3D are simultaneously made to your 2D plan--automatically.
  
  
• 3D Walkthrough:
  Create virtual tours to visualize your finished living space before you ever start your project.
  
  
• Accurate Natural Lighting:
  Visualize your home's interior at different times of day.
  
  
• Easy Zoom and Navigation
  
  
• And Much More!
  

Powerful Home Design Features

• Intelligent Walls:
  Easily draw interior and exterior walls that automatically connect and repair.
  
  
• Doors:
  Use the Door Wizard to add simple doors, bi-fold doors, French doors, sliding doors, garage doors and more.
  
  
• Windows:
  Just click along a wall to insert casement, hung, sliding, bay, vent, hopper or louvered windows, plus windows in virtually any shape.
  
  
• Hundreds of lighting fixtures
  

*Requires Internet connection

Product Description

Want to see how existing furnishings and wall hangings will look in your new room? It’s easy. HGTV Home Design & Remodeling software lets you import any photograph into your design. Even add personal photographs to visualize your family or even pets in your new home

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

143 of 147 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Solid product, but only if you take the time to learn it, April 6, 2009

By 

R. Landers (Minneapolis, MN) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: HGTV Home Design & Remodeling Suite (Software)

The reviews for this HGTV home design software are quite mixed. But the consistent thing about them is that the people that don't like the program never took the time to learn how to use it.

Don't fool yourself - this is a complex program. Despite all of the advertisements that it is "easy," it is basically a dumbed-down CAD (computer-aided design) program. It is easier than using most architect-quality programs, but it is much harder than learning Word. This is not jump-in-and-design-a-house kind of program.

If you have used CAD programs before, you will probably not have too much trouble adapting to this software. Some of the mappings are odd (it took me a while to find where to access positioned cameras, for example), but they're there. If you haven't used CAD programs before, I'd guess you will need at least 2 or 3 hours simply to learn how to navigate the program (and even have an idea as to what kinds of things you can do with it) before even trying to create your own house. If you don't take the 2 or 3 hours to run through online tutorials and at least skim through the 698-page user manual, you will get lost, and you will be frustrated. You have been warned.

So if all you are interested in is creating a basic nearly-to-scale representation of your home and see what different colors would look like on the wall, expect to put 5+ hours to get to that point. If you want it to be accurate down to the inch with picture-perfect furniture, it will take you much, much longer. As an example, I have used CAD programs before, so I jumped straight in, and it took me about 4 hours to put together the structure of the house alone (although wall placement is accurate to the inch). So that's not including any floor coverings, walls, paint, appliances, cabinets, etc, which I imagine will take at least as long, if not more.

Overall, it's a fairly high quality product marketed to people accustomed to the ease of use of an iPod, and I think that's its only real flaw. If you're willing to put in the hours to learn the software, you can get exactly what you're dreaming of: a working 3D virtual model of your home, from carpet to ceiling fans, that you can redecorate at will to see how that new arrangement of furniture in your bedroom will look without having to scuff the floors.

55 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, June 3, 2009

By 

J. Bader (San Antonio, TX) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: HGTV Home Design & Remodeling Suite (Software)

Several years ago I bought another program to do simple floor plans and 3D visuals, so I was familiar with the basics. I agree that you need to read the book and put some time into studying this program, but it's not that complicated. I was creating a floor plan within minutes. After I'd put in some interior walls, I tried to add windows to the outside of the house. The program refused to put the windows on exterior walls. It would let me add them between rooms, but not on the outside. I emailed Nova Development customer support with the question and waited two days for an response that did not answer the question, but said that the Home Design and Remodeling Suite is not for exterior design and I should upgrade to their more expensive program. I've experimented and found that I can add exterior windows, but I had to trash my previous work and start over.

A gable roof is probably the most basic roof design and is shown on the outside of the product box. The program did not seem to offer a gable roof as an option. I called customer support and was able to get through to a representative in reasonable time. I asked him about the gable roof and he didn't know. He put me on hold for a while and told me that no, gable roofs were not an option. This program is seriously limited.

I'm now sketching my layouts on graph paper looking for a better design program.

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Home Design & Remodel is more limited than you think, February 19, 2010

By 

T. Kish (Howell, NJ, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: HGTV Home Design & Remodeling Suite (Software)

I believe the objective of this company is to trick consumers into buying both versions. Don't be confused. Home Design & Remodeling (HD&R) is not a different product from Platinum. It is Platinum with random features missing. Not just missing sophisticated features. It even comes with the Platinum manual. (think free trial version). Software like this has a significant learning curve so if you only have the Platinum Manual to look at, everytime you start to struggle, you won't know if you're struggling with a limitation of the software version or if you just haven't figured it out yet. The manual tells you what to do... it just doesn't work. (if you buy HD&R that is). If you're thinking of buying this brand, get the Platinum, no exceptions (I haven't used platinum yet). If you're interested in my specific experience, read on.

I purchased the "Home Design and Remodeling Suite" version for planning my remodel. I thought I could get away with just using the less expensive version because my remodel is mostly cosmetic with move a door here, add a wall there. I figured the platinum version was for designing a house from scratch. I had to make these assumptions because reading the boxes of the two prospective products doesn't tell you what the differences are. I drew my existing house, which took about 15 hrs with the learning curve, if I had to do it again, it would likely take 3hrs. Then I started to struggle with floors. It auto generates floors by room based on where you draw walls, in some cases, the software got it wrong, but I couldn't seem to edit them. (For instance: Currently, my hallway, living room, dining room and kitchen are not divided by many walls so the software made that area all one floor.) The user manual explains how to change it, but I couldn't seem to get it to work. I first tried to go online to see if there were any message boards dedicated to it, then I tried the publisher's website which advertises sign up for the User Community to learn from other users. The `User Community' as it turns out just puts you on a newsletter (mailing list), which of course is nothing like a user community. I then called the customer support number, which recited business hrs that meant they should have been open, but were not. I called back later in the day, got a different recording with different hours. I called back during those hours and an automated menu told me to call a different phone number for technical support. I called it, they were not open yet. Once I finally got someone from technical support, (after about 10 min on hold) we concluded that my version does not support what I'm trying to do. They explained that everyone the same Platinum user manual so my manual tells me I can do things that the software can't, leading to hours of wasted time. I asked if there was someplace that listed the differences, and they gave me this website [...] when I pulled up the website and saw that it lists all of the same interior design capabilities for both applications, the guy told me that yes they do the same general things, but the platinum has more functionality. This concluded one conversation with tech service. Once I calmed down, I rationalized that despite the fact that I was angry at these people, my house was already mostly drawn in their software and if I upgraded, I'd surely acheive my end goal fastest. I called back to discuss upgrade options. Tech service told me that I could contact customer service and they told me that although there technically isn't an 'upgrade', they will let me purchase Platinum discounted to reflect my purchase of HD&R. Called customer service, they refused. Called tech service back, they contacted customer service on my behalf and... no luck. So my only option was return HD&R.

In terms of the money back guarantee plastered all over the box, they won't refund tax, they won't refund return shipping, return must be through tracked parcel service ($$), you cannot have removed UPC to obtain a rebate (many people fall into this trap) and refund takes one "billing cycle" ...what? They only pay by issuing checks... I'm now waiting for my refund (est. 5-6 weeks for refund)

The software? I think the Platinum will probably work very well, if I decide to buy it. I have some CAD/design experience so I knew any software like this would take some work to learn, and it did. If you have no experience with software like this, do not put yourself through the effort of stuggling with things that your software won't do. Do yourself a favor, buy the better version of whatever brand you buy.