If you are planning to decorate or re-decorate your home, then the chances are high that you spend hours browsing through the internet looking for good ideas. Maybe you even have a board on Pinterest to collect what great images and ideas you find on various websites related to home decor. Let me confess here that I have one such Pinterest board too, even though I have no immediate plans to re-decorate my home. But what to do? Planning interior decoration is so much fun, for girls especially.
And, of course, our smartphones can help us in that too. There are several apps available that can help us collect ideas and plan out our home's interior and exterior looks.
Here are two of the highest rated and most popular home decor apps:
The popularity of Houzz can be judged from the fact that New York Times put it on top of its list of "best apps for home improvement" and The Washington Post called Houzz as the "single best source"" for finding home decoration ideas. Even CNN has praised it as "Wikipedia of interior and exterior design."
With over seven million high-resolution images, Houzz has no dearth of ideas to inspire you. Whether it is for interior decoration or designing the exterior look of the house, the vast variety of ideas on Houzz would surely have several images and suggestions to inspire you. The app allows users to browse through the images by style, room and location or perform a search for a particular product using the easily accessible Search button. And if you like an idea, you can easily save it for later reference. If you want, you can also easily share it with your contacts.
The app also helps users to connect with 800,000 home improvement professionals and gives direct links to make purchase of home décor items easy too. Houzz app is easy to use and has a pleasing user interface. The large number of high resolution images that it has makes this app a delight to use. It also has a very useful Sketch feature that allows user to scribble on the photos to jot down personal notes and ideas and save them for future reference.
In the app's Settings, you can select your country. The default is UK. However, the available country list is very small and unfortunately does not include India. That will make it harder for Indian users of the app to purchase the products and avail services of the professionals. But the vast gallery of images can still be used to seek inspiration for home decor.
Houzz is available for free: iOS devices / Android devices.
Homestyler, besides being useful for home decoration, is a lot of fun to use and play around with. It allows users to snap a picture of their rooms. Then it turns that picture into a 3D canvas where users can tryout real products, wallpapers, lighting etc. and design their rooms. All these home decor products, lights, wall colours or wall papers are available in its vast database. Just choose and see how it will look in your room.
The app also has a Design Gallery where you can see and like the designs created by other users of the app. And of course, you can also showcase your own design. Another feature is Design Stream that provides interesting home decor pics and also useful articles and tips to help you make better decisions while designing your home.
HomeStyler app has several options to help users start designing their homes. There is a bit of learning curve though as users need to get familiar with various features. But with little practice and a lot of imagination, this app can make designing interior decoration lot of fun. Well, the app is fun to use even if you are not decorating your home and use it just for whiling away an idle hour. The in-app catalogues and Design Stream can help a lot in inspiring your creativity. This app too helps users to connect with professional designers.
I found HomeStyler app a bit slow though. It certainly needs a device with good resources.
The app is available for free: iOS devices / Android devices
Some days ago, I reviewed a Shimply shopping app. It too has a feature that allows users to see how a particular painting or other product would look in a room. I'm sure there are several other smartphone apps too with more useful features to help in interior decoration. If you know about any other app that you think is better, do let us know! Your experience can help others in their quest of having a perfect home decor for their homes.