Top interior design apps

When designing and decorating, sometimes the ideas in our heads don’t look so good once they’re executed. That’s why we love apps that help us layout our ideas, experiment and visualise before we start painting the walls and moving the furniture. Below are some apps that we’ve used to help us design and decorate our homes like pros.

Houzz for iPhone, iPad and android: free

This popular American home improvement app offers lots of interior design ideas. Browse through over 120 000 pictures of professionally-designed homes submitted by architects, interior designers, photographers, contractors and other design pros, and then save them to your personal idea books.

iHandy Level for iPhone, iPad and Android: free

If you’re one of those people who can’t walk past a skew picture without straightening it, then this is the app for you. Handy Level accurately checks how flat the surfaces in your home are to help you hang up your pictures evenly every time.

iHandy Carpenter for iPhone, iPad and Android: R15.99

This is a great app for the DIY enthusiast because it gives you five professional tools in one. Namely a plumb bob, surface level, steel protractor and steel ruler, and once calibrated, the plumb bob, surface level and level bar can also be used as an inclinometer/clinometer by reading the angles on the screen.

Home Interior Layout Designer – Mark on Call for iPhone and iPad: R30

Described as “the next best thing to hiring a designer or having an assistant”, this app will help you solve an array of design problems when creating or renovating a space. Professional interior designers and consumers alike, use it for intricate virtual planning and the designing of rooms, as well as working out logistics, deciding on colour schemes and the aesthetics of a space. You can snap pics of fabric, flooring and finishing inspirations you come across and insert them onto the floor plans to get a clearer picture of what the room might look like.

Peppermint 2 for iOS and Andrroid: free

A colour-swatch-building app that “takes the guesswork out of choosing colours”. Initially designed to help artists and web developers, this app has helped many people choose beautiful colour sets for their homes.