Online Space Planner Tool: Icovia Design

by Adrian How

Have plenty of ideas for your home but can’t visualise how it’d look when put together? Having problems visualising colour schemes? Can’t describe your ideas to your contractor and wish you had a printout of your plans instead?

What you need is a space planning tool and what I’ve found is the Icovia Online Space Planner. I took the tool for a test drive by using their ‘try it free’ session (which basically means you can mess around but can’t save your work unless you have a paid subcription). The GUI is very intuitive and extremely easy to use. The left panel allows you to select artifacts (i.e. furniture, structural items, appliances etc) to drag and drop onto the main design panel. Each artifact can be resized, rotated and colour-filled.

Here’s my very amateurish attempt at modeling my living room:

In all honesty, that effort took me only all of 10 minutes. Hence, the amateur effect and uneven sized stairs. However, with proper effort, one can create professional looking plans with this tool. Even if you’re not planning to pay the subscription fees, you can still draw your plans with this tool and get a snapshot of your work taken so you can pass your ideas to your contractor.

Alternatively, you can create your layout models using Google Skethup (it’s FREE!)

Download Google Sketchup here