Room Designer

Room Designer is a cosy isometric dollhouse you can rearrange all afternoon. The room is drawn cut away at a two-to-one angle: two papered back walls, a wooden floor, a window with a view of the hills and a door you can slide along the wall. Everything in it is chunky and rounded with thick plum outlines and soft shading, like a model room built out of painted wood. Choose a square room, a wide one or an L-shape, then pick from sixteen wallpapers and sixteen floors — planks, herringbone, checkerboard, penny tiles, terrazzo, shag carpet — each with eight colour tints.

The catalogue runs across the bottom of the screen on a phone and down the side on a desktop, sorted into Rooms, Walls, Floors, Furniture, Decor, Plants and Pets. There are well over a hundred original pieces: single beds and bunk beds, sofas and wingback chairs, dining tables, desks, wardrobes, bookcases full of little painted books, a kitchen island, a bathtub, an upright piano and a grand one. Tap a thumbnail and the piece lands in the middle of the room; drag it across the grid and its footprint glows green where it fits and red where it does not. Turn it with the rotate handle or the R key, recolour it from six swatches, and drop lamps, mugs, laptops, cakes and little plants on top of any table, desk or shelf. Rugs slide under the furniture, posters and mirrors and fairy lights snap to the back walls, and a cat, a dog and a rabbit find their own way around the free squares before settling on a sofa for a nap.

Press N and the room turns to evening: the window fills with stars, every lamp and candle and string of fairy lights starts to glow, and the whole room goes warm and dim. A playful cosy score watches what you have done — somewhere to sit, warm light, green things, something soft underfoot, something on the walls, a friend about — and tells you whether the place is still bare boards or properly snug. Undo and redo go thirty steps back, eight starter rooms are there to remix, and you can keep fifteen rooms of your own in the browser and export any of them as a picture. It works with a mouse, with the keyboard, and with a finger: pinch to zoom, two fingers to pan, drag to move.