Amsterdam, June 1 — Before today, designing a dream home required at least two of three assets: expensive tools, architectural expertise, and extraordinary patience. Now after three years of development, CEO Jeroen Bekkers says the new service Floorplanner.com is “so easy a child could do it, so easy a grandmother could do it, and so enjoyable to use that both would actually want to.”
Floorplanner is not merely a simplified version of professional architecture tools. Its builders, Dutch development company Suite75, have taken the best of Web 2.0 and brought it to home design; a rich visual interface, focus on the user, and letting users share their designs are key aspects of Floorplanner.com. Users are able to embed their designs on any site that allows flash players, letting them show friends and family anything from the current state of their room to plans for a future dream house.
Designs on Floorplanner are more than walls, windows, and stairs. Over 300 furniture and decorative objects can be placed, moved, stretched, shrunk, or even re-colored. High-quality graphics give each item a detailed look and feel, unlike the more abstract representations of other architecture software; a glass table placed in Floorplanner is realistically transparent, showing a rug underneath clearly without ruining the sense of depth, of the glass table being above the rug.
In addition to graphic quality, Floorplanner is an extremely practical tool as well. “You don’t have to know anything about architecture to design a room,” says Bekkers. “Floorplanner takes care of measurements and spacing to let a designer do what they want to do: design.” Floorplanner was given its architecture expertise by its programmers. Jeroen Bekkers, his wife Machteld Wijnands, and partners Tim Knip and Gert-Jan van der Wel, all have a background in architecture or civil engineering. Their expertise is given life through Floorplanner, with the help of Suite75’s other programmers, designers, and support staff.
Over 50,000 users have registered to try Floorplanner since its beta release. At The Next Web conference in Amsterdam, Suite75 will announce the end of Floorplanner’s beta version and the release of paid account upgrades, first deployed one week ago. In addition to home users of all ages, Floorplanner is a tool useful for real estate agents, interior designers, and other home contracting professionals. Floorplanner Pro accounts exist to allow professionals a custom branded interface to present to clients. Multiple projects, multiple floors per project, and unlimited design variations per floor are included as part of a Pro account for professional users, or a Plus account for personal users.
Soon Floorplanner will be for more than planning the design of a room or house, it will also help users buy the items they’ve placed in their design. Suite75 is currently in negotiations with a company to let Floorplanner designers use representations of real-world items in their Floorplanner designs, which can then be purchased online. Other companies are being sought to partner with to expand Floorplanner’s furniture and decoration inventory. “What better way to shop for furniture than by seeing it in your own house?”, Bekkers asks.
The Suite75 team built Floorplanner using two popular web technologies: Ruby on Rails, and Adobe Flash. These two technologies give Floorplanner a very smooth and visually pleasing interface, while reducing the bandwidth needed to run it. The other benefit is that Flash is a ubiquitous technology; Flash Player 8, required to view a Floorplanner design, is installed in over 95% of the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Japan, according to the Adobe website, and in over 85% of China, for which Floorplanner provides a localized translation.
Suite75 is committed to continued development of Floorplanner, as an already profitable business that has the potential to become the most-used consumer home design tool in the world. “We wanted to give people a tool that’s easy to use, fun to use, and empowering to use,” Bekkers says.”Floorplanner’s combination of an intuitive interface, a visually pleasing experience, and sharing capabilities really accomplish that. It’s a great tool for home users, or for a customer’s clients.”
Free versions, paid versions, and more information can be found at Floorplanner.com.
Just returning from the Demofall07 conference in San Diego were we presented a new product in collaboration with Tubes Networks. 
