My wife and I are constantly trying to reimagine our home. We bought a home that the previous owners lived in for nearly 35 years, so there were some immediate style changes we knew we wanted to make upon moving in. While we’ve done the whole fresh coat of paint, new wallpaper, bringing our furniture in part of settling into a home, there are now actual design changes that we can make to get excited about.
We’ve made some upgrades to the exterior of the house, such as adding a fence and putting in a generator. Boosting the house’s resale value is nice, but making it more enjoyable to live in is our real goal. IKEA has been a place that we’ve used for smart DIY projects in our home. But, in the past, we had to either go to the closest store (a good 45 minutes away) or scour the product pages for hours. With IKEA Kreativ, we can reimagine our home right on our computer.
IKEA Kreativ gives you full control over design
You become your own designer
IKEA has a planning tool right on its website that you might not even know exists. It’s called IKEA Kreativ, and it provides you with a blank canvas to design your room, however you see fit with IKEA products at your disposal.
You probably have seen DIY TikToks about ways people use IKEA hacks to create elaborate built-ins, desks, and more. Using Kreativ lets you see how all of these look either in your room or in a room that looks like yours.
This gives you full reign over how you want the room to look because you’re actually going to see what it’s going to cost to create your vision. You don’t have to do any fancy calculators or try and figure out the measurements of furniture to see how they’ll fit next to each other. Kreativ gives you the platform to visualize how they’ll fit in your space.
Kreativ gives you empty floor plans to play around with, or you can upload a floor plan of the room you’re designing and go from there. It can be as customized as you want, or you can just see how something looks on a whim. If you’ve used an LLM like ChatGPT to render pictures of how you want your house to look, this takes it a step further by actually using IKEA products to fill those spaces.
Designing a room is so easy
I love figuring out how my home will look
IKEA helps you by showing you quick tips on how to use Kreativ, so you’re not just fumbling around blind. It should appear as soon as you click on a room design.
Depending on the kind of room you’re designing, or if you’re designing an entire smart home, Kreativ already lines up the kind of furniture you’re likely going to need. Setting up a bedroom? The first options are beds, dressers, storage and organizers, and dressers with drawers. Not only can you filter by the type of furniture, but it then shows you an image of the furniture and the price.
Just clicking on one of the pictures populates it into the 3D layout of the room. Clicking on that furniture allows you to move it around the room by dragging it with your cursor. Once you click onto it and put it where you want it to be, you can then customize it by rotating it, copying it to duplicate it, changing the color, adding accessories to it, and more. Kreativ wants to provide you with a true view of what your room will look like, so you can either go into IKEA knowing exactly what you want to get or ordering it for pickup or delivery.
My wife and I used this to decide what type of desk we wanted to put in our daughter’s room. We uploaded a photo of her room with an empty wall where the desk was going to go. After playing around in Kreativ, we toyed around with the RELATERA and MITTPLAN before settling on the HEMNES because of the storage space it offered. Quickly searching through chairs also let my daughter select the one she wanted the most. It made for an easy experience and really took no time at all, saving us what would have been a trip to the store and perusing just to maybe find something that looked good in the room.
There are multiple ways to use Kreativ
Get more out of the situation
You can rotate the view and look at the room in different ways. You can choose the Dollhouse feature, which shows you what the room will look like as if you’re looking into a small model of it from the outside. But if you want a higher angle on it all, the Top view lets you look down on the space from the ceiling.
There are four different side views, letting you see the room from each wall. This is massively helpful when you potentially want to see how far a piece of furniture will stick out from one side of the room. Plus, in this editing portion of Kreativ, you can change the wall color of the room to give you a better idea of what the room could look like if you paint it. I like this because it helps me imagine the room differently, rather than what it currently looks like if I upload a picture of it.
After you design your room and choose your furniture, which gets added to a cart, you can book an appointment to discuss the room layout with an IKEA professional. They can advise you further on whether what you built is plausible. This is an added bonus just for using Kreativ.
You can save your designs and come back to them at any point if you’re logged in. IKEA Kreativ Design Tips also have a running blog on ways to use the system to advance your home designing abilities.
IKEA Kreativ is the best design tool you haven’t heard of
If you’re looking to save money and do home decorating yourself, using IKEA Kreativ is a smart way to get a full look at what your home could be. The interactive planning tool gives users the ability to do more at home before they step foot in a store. Of course, if you want to enjoy walking through IKEA, you can totally bring your design with you and shop in person.