Getting started

Open the editor

Go to the app from any modern browser. Nothing to install: the editor loads in the page. The free plan needs no account to draw or save locally; during early access, access to the editor is by invitation — leave your email and you get a magic link back. The same tools work for a home, a shop floor or an office layout.

Start from an example

The welcome gallery offers ready-made plans grouped by kind — flats, houses, an apartment building, and shops and offices. Each one shows a technique you may want for yourself: a basement reached by a straight flight, a mezzanine on a spiral stair, a conservatory, a circular house, a ring-shaped office campus, dormer bedrooms lit by skylights, a corner shop with a glazed front, a Tokyo convenience store with a striped fascia, a city brasserie with a marble dining room and a street awning, a Paris café with a zinc counter and a pavement terrace, a neighbourhood gym, an open-plan office floor, a warehouse with a loading dock, Station F’s three vaulted halls with a glass grid on every storey, a storefront and parvis steps, and an open-centre atrium, a market-garden greenhouse with crop rows and growing benches under a glass barrel vault, a Manhattan duplex penthouse served by its own lift behind a glass curtain wall, a mixed-use building with a shop on the ground floor and flats above, a four-classroom primary school with its canteen, yard and gym, a fifteen-storey Manhattan tower (lobby, shops, offices, hotel, rooftop) with its street, cabs and subway entrance. Open one, then change anything in it. Already have projects on this device? Open My plans on the same welcome screen. A search field sits at the top of that list, and of the example gallery, so you can filter by name.

Or start from a random building

In a hurry, or just curious? The magic wand under the trace bar draws a whole building for you — rooms, doors, windows, furniture, roof and garden. It first asks a few short questions, and every one of them already answers "Any": you only pick what you care about.

"Surprise me" skips the questions entirely and draws everything at random. Whatever you choose, the result replaces the current plan and a single undo brings it back.

• What kind of building — house, flat, apartment building, shop or warehouse
• What size, and how many levels
• Pitched roof or flat roof
• What sits around it — a garden, a pool, or nothing at all

Draw a first room

A trace bar sits at the bottom of the editor: twelve tools — free room, free wall, container, column, door, window, roof type, roof window, circulations, ground type, outdoor layout and render styles. It stays visible when the catalogue is closed, and a tool you cannot use yet says why when you hover or focus it. Pick free room (R) and drag corner to corner — on the plan, or straight on the floor of the 3D view, where a ghost rises as you drag and a simple click drops a standard-size room you can then resize with its handles; the tool releases once the room is placed; pick free wall (W) and click or tap to set corners, closing the shape to create a room. A room’s type (living room, bedroom, kitchen…) is chosen after the trace, from the room menu — not as a catalogue tile. The catalogue — furniture, greenery and equipment — opens as a bottom sheet from the Catalogue button (grid) to the right of the trace bar, or from the plus button on a phone. Search or browse the list, then drag onto the plan — the sheet steps aside so you can drop anywhere — or click to arm and click again to place. Dimensions appear as you draw and can be edited afterwards. The photo underlay, pan, rotate, doors and windows sit under the trace bar — one Pan lock for both the plan and the 3D view. Zoom and five layout buttons — the plan, the model as a floating inset over the plan, both side by side, the plan as a floating inset over the model, the model — are fixed at the bottom-right of the editor. The first room you draw brings the model in from the left as a floating inset in the bottom-right, so the volume rises with that first stroke. The 2D scale bar and the 3D orientation cube sit just above the trace bar. Floor area shows in the top bar, right after the dwelling name. Close the sheet with its handle, by clicking beside it, or with Escape — the Catalogue button stays to the right of the trace bar to open it again. On a phone the plus button opens the same sheet and covers the trace bar — trace with the sheet shut. Both bottom bars fit on one line each: the trace bar scrolls with a finger, and the view row folds behind “Tools and display” (⋯) — Copilot and Generate stay visible.

Add openings

Doors and windows snap to walls. Open the Door or Window tool on the trace bar, pick the kind, then drag it onto a wall in 2D or in the 3D view — or click a chip to arm it and click the wall. Both tools stay greyed until the plan holds a room. Planaira keeps them on the wall and warns when they would overlap.

Let Planaira fill in the blanks

Three helpers under the trace bar finish what the plan already implies, and each counts as a single undo. They never touch what you placed yourself.

• Add openings — a door on the wall that serves the room best, then windows on the outside walls, sized to the room
• Furnish — a furnishing rule per room type and size; select a single room to furnish only that one
• Fence the plot — a hedge around the ground, taller on the street side, with a gate lined up with the front door

Set the basics

Settings hold what belongs to the whole project: wall height (from 2.00 m to 4.00 m, with a chip to return to your region’s usual value), wall thickness, the house facade (render, blockwork, cut stone, brick, wood, concrete, zinc or glass — a swatch bar; choosing one replaces every facade on the building, then a room or a wall can differ), and the unit system. The 3D view follows while you drag and reframes when you let go; anything that no longer fits under the ceiling is brought back under it, in one undo step.

Trace over an existing plan

Have a photo or a scan of a paper plan? The Background image tool slips it under yours so you can redraw on top. Drag its corners to size it, or use Set the scale: draw a line along a wall whose length you know, type that length, and the image is scaled to your plan. Cancel or Escape drops the line without changing the scale.

Once the scale is set, Trace the plan analyses a top-down plan. Orthogonal drawings become editable rooms, with doors and windows on the sides; if the rooms are not rectangular (a diagonal wall, for example), it traces free walls instead — including slants — and places doors and windows where the stroke breaks, so you can place rooms by hand on the underlay. Review the ghosts, then confirm — one Undo rolls the whole batch back. Cancel or Escape drops the analysis or the preview without applying it. The underlay stays locked underneath so you can fix what the detection missed. Photos of rooms, perspective shots and unclear images are refused. Dragging the image corners only sizes it on screen — real metres come from Set the scale.

The slider changes its opacity, and the Lock switch stops it from being grabbed so clicks go back to the walls. Cancel and remove the image, in the catalogue bar, leaves the whole underlay flow and takes the picture off the plan — one Undo brings it back. A photographed plan is not a survey: it carries no dimensions, the 3D ignores it, and it stays out of PDF and image exports. Detection runs on your device; the file never leaves it.

Measure without changing anything

The Measure tool (`M`) draws a line between two points and reads its length — hold Shift to keep it straight, and Esc clears every measurement. Nothing on the plan is modified. The Dimensions button (`C`) shows or hides the room dimensions drawn along the walls.

Save and come back

Plans are stored locally in your browser (IndexedDB). Open the project name in the top bar to create, rename, duplicate or delete plans. Settings can erase every saved plan at once, after a confirmation — a blank plan then takes their place. Once rooms exist, the total floor area appears right after the name. The free plan keeps up to 3 saved plans; Pro raises that to 99. The active plan is restored when you return. Editor layout — 2D zoom and pan, 3D camera, the split between plan and model, full-screen view — is kept separately in the same browser (`localStorage`) so you find the workspace as you left it. If the browser cannot save, a red disk icon appears next to the project name with the error; while saving works, nothing shows there.

Raise it in 3D

Switch to the 3D view at any time. Walls rise from the plan; you can orbit, zoom, and walk at eye level. Changes in 2D update the model live.

Keyboard shortcuts

Open More in the top bar, then Keyboard shortcuts — or press the `?` key — to list every shortcut, grouped by context: general, 2D plan, 3D view and walkthrough. The same list is available as a one-page printable sheet in your language, and on the Keyboard shortcuts page of these guides. Pan is also a button under the trace bar, the same lock for the plan and the 3D view (same as holding Space), for anyone who does not use the shortcut.