Virtual Decor Tools
Help Narrow Choices

In January, Jeanette and Dave Smith visited a furniture store to get some decorating ideas for the library of their Gilbertsville, Pa. home. By the time they left, they'd spent $3,000.

What helped nail the sale? An online decorating tool on the floor showroom of the local Raymour & Flanigan furniture store. With help from a sales clerk, the Smiths typed their library's dimensions into the tool, including space for a two-panel window and entryway. After a room sketch appeared on the screen, the Smiths selected images of the store's furniture and accessories from a menu and placed boxed outlines of them in the layout. After tinkering for more than an hour, the couple purchased two sofa tables, two table lamps, an ottoman, a floor lamp and two leather chairs.

"It was a tremendous help," says Ms. Smith, a 42-year-old homemaker who says she doesn't use computers at all. "It gave me the opportunity to be creative and made me feel special, like I was getting a designer room, only I'd accomplished it on my own."

A host of new and revamped home-design tools have emerged across the Internet and in store showrooms to help consumers visualize everything from how furniture fits in a room to how a new a paint color might look with existing decor.

Online home decorating tools aren't entirely new -- pioneering versions appeared on the Web as long as five years ago. Some of the latest iterations are still clunky and difficult to navigate. And even the most elegant virtual program can't replace the actual experience of sitting on a couch or feeling a fabric's texture. But the current generation of online tools are helping consumers sort through their myriad choices, and helping stores make sales in the process.

Caron Brown's experience with "Arrange-a-Room," a tool at Better Homes and Gardens' Web site, BHG.com, is typical of the ups and downs consumers are finding with the tools. "It took me a while to figure out how to get the furniture to fit how I wanted it," says Ms. Brown, 40, of Garland, Texas. She says she couldn't recognize many of the items she selected from the tool's menu of photographs after placing them in the layout, because they became two-dimensional black-and-white images.

Still, it gave her an idea of the kind of dining-room table she wanted, says Ms. Brown, a customer-service representative for a hospital. When her brother later offered to give her a table, "I knew it would fit," she adds.

Dave Kurns, editor-in-chief of Meredith Interactive, BHG.com's Des Moines, Iowa-based publisher, says a new version of the tool is launching later this year that will use more realistic images and a wider choice of fabric and paint colors.

For Chris Farlow, an online paint-selection tool called "Color Smart" from Behr Process Corp. took a while, but in the end it helped him take a chance he otherwise might not have considered. "The payoff is there, but you have to be willing to work for it," he says. He used it first in a store, then later logged on to the Behr.com site at home.

The 41-year-old marketing professional from Raleigh, N.C. says he scrolled through a vast "inspiration library" organized by such terms as "lifestyles" and "mood."

Eventually, he chose a lime green. "It looked freaky in the store," he says. "But after I saw how it looked online in a bedroom setting, I was confident it would look good."

Though he says he doesn't have a good sense of color, houseguests were convinced otherwise when they saw the results. "Being a guy, the ultimate testament was when my female friends came over and said I have an amazing sense of design. They were really impressed," he says.

Some consumers remain cautious, and understandably so. Brandy Foulkes used the tools at BHG.com for help decorating a 140-year-old farmhouse she and her husband recently bought in Falls River, Wis. But she says she probably will shop further in stores before making purchases. "I like to see and touch furniture in person," she says. Most online retailers don't provide enough detail about how furniture is made, the 27-year-old church secretary adds. "Sometimes they say it's made of solid veneer, but is it solid on both sides?"

Kim Garretson, editor and publisher of LivingHome.com, an online magazine, says he expects that in four to five years online decorating tools will be able to provide realistic representations of actual rooms -- "with real-looking surfaces, wall coverings and fabrics," he says.

Still, he says, "something may fit and look good in an online layout, but technology will never bring the true feel and comfort of an actual home environment."

-- Sarah E. Needleman is associate editor at RealEstateJournal.com.

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