Turbo Floorplan 3D Home & Landscape Pro

The bottom might have fallen out of the housing market, but the enthusiasm for home re-modelling – or even complete new builds – shows no sign of ending.

Hence Turbo Floorplan 3D Home & Landscape Pro, which includes everything required to design a house, inside and out, as well as the surrounding gardens.

We recommend beginning with the House Builder wizard that walks the user through the basics of house creation. You can select the number of floors, floor-to-ceiling height, house shape, garage position, overall dimensions and so on, and the program takes care of details such as the floor, wall and foundation types, based on your choices.

The result is a simple two-dimensional blueprint-style floor plan which can be then adapted by adding elements such as doors, windows and internal walls. You can also ‘paint’ the wallpaper on, add carpet, appliances and furniture, and then go on to landscape the outside.

The program automatically assigns average prices for each material involved (you can amend these) so it’s also possible to get an estimate for the actual cost of the design and build.

We were impressed, overall, with Turbo Floorplan’s ease of use. If you want to add a window for instance, you click the Windows button, choose a style and size and drag it into position. If you then want to use the same window again straight away, it’s already selected so you can then drop it anywhere else on the house where it’s required.

Users are unlikely to run out of inspiration – there are over 100 doors and more than 180 windows, to give just two examples. The revamped interface in this new version is excellent and lets you view plans in various 2D and 3D modes, filter out certain types of objects so you can concentrate on others, and has much better tools for positioning objects so things line up neatly.

Tooltips are now activated by hovering the mouse over an item rather than by right-clicking, which helps newcomers to proceed smoothly.

Various other improvements in rendering, printing, changing dimensions and creating custom roofs solidify Turbo Floorplan’s status as our home-design program of choice, and it’s good value too, compared with other design tools available.