Rating: 
Summary: For the money, it was more useful than I had expected.
Review: For the money, Better Homes & Gardens Home Designer Suite 6.0 was the best, and it could read the plans in 3D Home Architect 4.0 - which was great too, but had issues with XP - so I posted on both products. Apparently this is the upgrade to 3D Home Architect - which you can research. I recently designed my garage that I planned to look exactly like my house, complete with Cultured Stone from their library. All I had to do was draw the walls, install windows, cabinets, doorways, and it automatically built the foundation with the slab. Then the hard part - show my wife in 3D what I was doing, and I had to cut it back in size. I was able to print the plans, and get my building permit with very little work, and probably saved myself a lot money and time, and it was more useful than I had expected.
Rating:
Summary: A 10 STAR EXCELLENT PROGRAM...
Review: FOR YOU PEOPLE THAT WHINE ABOUT THIS AND THAT GO BUY PUNCH SOFTWARE BECAUSE THEIR SOFTWARE IS COMPLETE JUNK, BH&G IS 10X BETTER. IF YOU WANT MUCH BETTER TOP OF THE LINE SOFTWARE GO SPEND $5000.00! IN MY OPINION THIS IS BY FAR THE BEST SOFTWARE I HAVE USED FOR DOING THE (BASIC) HOME DESIGNING I NEED. I DO IT AS A HOBBY. IM NOT AN ARCHITECT. THE ONLY THINGS I WOULD HAVE LIKED TO SEE WERE MORE WINDOW TREATMENTS. BUT, UNFORTUNATELY THEY WON'T BE. THE RENDERING IS FANTASTIC. YOU CAN DESIGN EACH ROOM INDIVIDUALLY. NOT LIKE PUNCH WHERE YOU HAVE TO USE A BREAK WALL TOOL IN THE ROOM(S) YOU WANT A DIFFERENT COLOR. I CAN GO ON AND ON ABOUT THEM. IM JUST GLAD THAT CHIEF HAS COME OUT WITH AFFORDABLE HOME DESIGN SOFTWARE. OH, AND THEIR LANDSCAPING PART OF THE PROGRAM IS AWESOME TOO. THANKYOU CHIEF ARCHITECT!!!!
Rating:
Summary: Easy To Use
Review: Great Product,
My wife and I have been planning to remodel our kitchen. A friend recommended BHG Home Designer. It was easy to install, and within an hour we had a plan of our current kitchen down to the tile floor and cabinet woodgrain. We drew four walls, made a 3D view, and then were able to add and resize cabinets, appliances, windows, and lights. The best thing was that my wife and I can sit down together and design different kitchens, save and modify them later. Next, I am going to model my entire home and test different exterior paint colors. I understand that the landscaping tools are just as good as the home design tools. I can't wait to use them. The best $80.00 that I have spent in a long time!
Rating:
Summary: Excellent and Easy
Review: I am thinking about converting part of a room into a bathroom, then adding another room to my home. I was able to install this software, fire it up and then essentially diagram out my entire home in about 3 hours. You can be as detailed as you want by adding accessories, furniture, etc. There is a large library of figures to add to your home. Drawing is easy. Basically it is everything I wanted in a software. I tried some demos of other products and they were so convoluted in the way they worked that they took all the fun out of the project. With this program, just the opposite. This software makes drawing easy. I highly recommend it. I am using it on a Gateway Pentium 4 notebook and it has been working flawlessly. I am also using the touchpad on my notebook instead of a mouse and it is very easy to use. Have fun...you're going to like it. By the way, I haven't even touched the other advanced features. I'm sure I'll like it even more then.
Rating: 
Summary: Almost worthless for anything but a box with a roof
Review: I bought this software to help design an addition to my house, but Home Designer Suite 6 is not even able to let me draw my existing house, a 1400 square foot house with an attached garage.The problem is more than one style of roof, and a mud room attached to the front of the house. Home Designer cannot accept more than 1 roof style, and does not allow me to add a roof to the mud room without automagically changing the roof on the main part of the house. I feel really stupid for spending $80 on this product, and will probably go back to paper and pencil.
Rating:
Summary: THE BASICS
Review: I HAD THE PLEASURE OF TEST DRIVING THIS PROGRAM. THEY HAVE AVAILABLE Chief Architect FOR THE PROFESSIONAL, WHICH I HAVE BEEN LOOKING AT SEEING I AM A PROFESSIONAL FLOORING SUPPLIER. CHIEF HAS MORE FEATURES BUT IN MY CASE TOO MUCH AND MANY I WOULD NOT USE. BUT HOME DESIGNER HAS ALL THE FEATURES I AM LOOKING FOR LIKE THE CAD FEATURES AND AUTOMATIC ROOM FILL WHICH WILL PRINT LINES IN A ROOM THAT SIMULATES HARD WOOD. ALL THIS FOR A REASONABLE PRICE TAG. I HAVE USED THE BETA VERSION ON PROFESSIONAL AND HOME XP WITH OUT ANR PROBLEMS. SO FOR SOME ONE WHO WANTS THE BASICS PLUS A FEW OPTONS AND DOES NOT WANT TO SPEND 169.00 PLUS FOR THE SOFTWARE, HOME DESIGNER BY FAR IS LEEPS AND BOUNDS A HEAD OF THE REST.
Rating:
Summary: Very good upgrade from 3d Home Architect 4.0
Review: I have been using 3D Home Architect for several version until they switched to a new CAD engine for Version 5. This is the upgrade to 3D Home Architect 4, and it's very much worth it. There are a lot of things improved since Ver 4.0. The ability to shape terrain is great. The ability to build curved walls, and the ability to paint specific surfaces in 3D with differant materials are both welcome additions. 3D render quality, speed and functionality are vastly improved.
Rating:
Summary: Don't buy this for landscaping
Review: I needed landscape design software, and since all the other products had gotten poor reviews and this software had not, I decided to try it. No one else had mentioned the landscape portion of the software, so I didn't really know what to expect. I'm sure this program is fine if you want to design a house, or an addition to your house, but if you desire lanscaping software, pass. The plant library is very small and does not include many common landscaping plants, and you can forget about finding something exotic or unusual. The software only allows one to draw circular or kidney shaped beds. Yes, you can attempt to drag the beds to the desired dimensions, but the effect is less than desirable. For landscaping, this was an expensive dud.
Rating: 
Summary: Doesn't allow for true Multi-Level Home Designs
Review: I purchased Home Designer Suite 6.0 after using Broderbund's 3D Home Architect Professional 5.0 to design my new vacation house because I had some design and rendering issues with 3D Home Architect Professional 5.0. I read on Chief Architect's website that 3D Home Architect wasn't the "real" version 5.0 and that theirs was. Given the trouble I was having with Broderbund's product editing the appearance of walls (where it had a mind of its own despite your settings) and the moving the view of 3D renderings which only occasionally worked, I bought into Chief Architect's claim that theirs was a superior product built by people who designed professional CAD products.
Minutes after I installed Home Designer Duite 6.0, however, I was dissappointed: no multi-level designs! Can you believe it? Using 3D Home Architect, I was able to design a complex 8 level vacation home design. It was really only a 3 floor design, but I had a sunken living room, double height cielings in the living room and a mezzanine level. With this product you can only do very bland 2-3 floors without multiple "levels". I imagine they purposefully restricted its usefulness in order to get you to buy their $500 version (which is still only a "pro-sumer" version) but 3D Home architect had this "make or break" functionality for under $100, so Chief Architect should too.
I am very disappointed that Chief Arcitect didn't say how their product will not allow multi-level designs and I am going to see if they will give me my money back. I had high hopes for this product and it let me down.
Other features about the product seemed good, if a bit too simplistic. It seems that their furnishing and terrain editing tools are superior to 3D Home Architect, but if you want to have an interesting house with multiple levels (meaning not only 3 standard height levels) you just can't buy this product. Too bad, much else about it seemed better than 3D Home Architect, I guess I will have to go back to Broderbund's version 6.0 3D Home Architect.
Rating:
Summary: Probably good for most purposes
Review: I read many reviews of home design programs before buying this one. Although it installed and ran without any problems (on Windows 2000), I was unable to accomplish what I wanted with it, which was draw some designs involving wooden beam structures, and flat Santa Fe style roofs. It seems that one can only draw the high level objects that it has preprogrammed, and cannot draw arbitrary objects. I also found it impossible to draw walls of thichnesses other than the dimensions preprogrammed (e.g., I wanted a 12" thick wall, but the only choices were something like 6 and 9"). The program claims to have "full CAD ability", but this appears to be only 2D CAD, not 3D CAD.
This program is probably good if you can use the objects built in (i.e., their walls, roofs, etc).
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