A kitchen is a physical space, and the two things you need most while designing one — the tape measure and the wall — are never at your desk. On a tablet, the assistant can draw the room while you stand in it.
Stand in the kitchen you are trying to design and count what is already in your hands: a tape measure, a phone with four photographs of the fuse box, and a pencil with no paper. The plan is on a laptop on the dining table, two rooms away. Every fact you have just learned — that the wall bows by half an inch in the middle, that the window casing is an inch wider than you remembered, that there is a socket exactly where the fridge wants to stand — has to survive the walk to that table. Most of them do. The one that does not is the one you meet again on delivery day, in a hallway full of boxes.
Designing a kitchen at a desk is mostly an exercise in carrying facts between two places. You measure a wall at 142″, walk to the computer, and type 142. That works until the day you type 124, or until you measure the wall at one height instead of three and never discover that it narrows by three-quarters of an inch at the skirting. Rooms are not square and walls are not plumb; the whole of chapter 01 exists because of it.
What changes when the plan is in your hands, in the room, is not speed. It is that the answer becomes checkable against the thing itself. A run drawn 96″ long can be held up against the wall it will live on while you are standing at that wall. The 34″ gap you left for the range is a gap you can look at, with your own body in it, rather than a number in a box. And the room gets to argue back while you are still listening — the radiator, the step down to the back door, the casing that eats two inches at the corner.
What they search at midnight “kitchen design app ipad” — usually typed from the kitchen floor, with the tape measure still out and the laptop two rooms away.
Everything else on this site describes the browser planner, and that is the part that works today. It opens in a browser, on whatever you already own, and installs nothing: walls, cabinets, 2D, 3D, elevations, the countertop drawing and a running quote all work without an account.
The iPad and iPhone app is not on the App Store yet. There is no download link on this page, and we are not going to promise you a date. What this chapter is for is the other question — what a tablet standing in the kitchen actually adds, and why it turns out to be a genuinely different tool rather than the same tool on a smaller screen.
In the browser, Emma edits a design that already exists. Every one of her editing tools hangs off something already in the drawing: add a cabinet beside item four, slide item six three inches left, take item eleven out. Walls are yours, drawn with a mouse. That is a reasonable division of labour when you are sitting down.
The app gives her a second set of tools, and they are the reason the tablet is not just a smaller window. She can build the room from nothing while you talk. Tapping her avatar starts the call immediately, with no confirmation step, because you tapped her on purpose — and from the first sentence there is something for her to do even though the canvas is empty.
| The job | Say something like | What lands on the canvas |
|---|---|---|
| Hear what is there | “What have we got so far?” | She reads the canvas back: the walls, their lengths, what is sitting on them |
| Draw the room | “Draw an L-shaped room.” | One of four shapes: a single wall, an L, a U, or a G with a peninsula |
| Set a wall’s length | “Make wall one a hundred and forty-two inches.” | That wall changes; the view pulls back to keep the room in frame |
| Put something on a wall | “Sink about halfway along wall one.” | The item lands on the wall you named, where you said |
| Move it | “Slide the fridge further along wall two.” | One item moves. Nothing else does |
| Take it out | “Take the range out again.” | One item leaves |
| Add an island | “Put an island in.” | An island appears in the room |
| Start over | “Clear it and let’s try a U.” | An empty canvas, ready for a different shape |
| Fill it with cabinets | “Right — fill it in.” | The room is handed to the automatic design, which lays out the cabinets |
The important thing about that list is what is not in it. There are no coordinates. She takes semantic instructions — the shape of the room, the length of a named wall, roughly how far along a wall something sits — and the app works out the geometry from them. Nobody standing on a stepladder wants to say “x equals one hundred and forty-two, y equals zero” out loud, and no assistant should be trusted to hold a coordinate system in its head while you are holding a tape measure in yours.
Two smaller things make it survivable in practice. Every step she draws is one step of undo, so a wrong wall length is one word to take back rather than a shape to redraw. And the view re-frames itself as the room grows, so the thing you just made is on screen instead of somewhere off the edge while you are still talking about it.
You — “Draw an L-shaped room.”
Emma — “There’s an L on the canvas. What are the wall lengths?”
You — “Wall one is a hundred and forty-two inches.”
Emma — “Wall one is a hundred and forty-two. And wall two?”
You — “A hundred and two. Hang on — a hundred and four.”
Emma — “Wall two is a hundred and four. The view has pulled back to fit.”
You — “The sink goes about halfway along wall one. That’s where the pipes are.”
Emma — “Sink on wall one, about halfway.”
You — “Fridge at the far end of wall two.”
Emma — “Fridge on wall two, at the far end.”
You — “And read the whole thing back to me.”
You — “Good. Fill it in.”
Emma — “Handing it to the automatic design now.”
… and afterwards — the room comes back with cabinets in it, and from that point she can work on the cabinets themselves: add one beside another, slide one along its wall, take one out, undo.
The whole exchange is five facts — a shape, two wall lengths, two fixtures — and every one of them is something you can only really know while standing in the room. That is the argument for the tablet in one paragraph.
There is one refusal built into that last step, and it is worth a section of its own because of what it says about everything else. Handing a room to the automatic design requires a sink. If you have drawn walls, named their lengths and asked her to fill it in without ever saying where the water is, she stops and asks where the sink goes before anything else happens.
The reason is not fussiness. A kitchen laid out around no sink is not a kitchen; it is a corridor of boxes. The sink is what the rest of the plan is measured from — the dishwasher goes beside it and on which side is a real decision, the run either side of it is where the work actually happens, and the corner nearest it is the corner whose blind cabinet you will curse or thank for a decade. An automatic layout without that anchor is not a rough draft. It is a confident, complete, plausible-looking answer to a question nobody asked, and those are the most expensive kind.
The same rule turns up everywhere in the product.
Ask the browser planner what to do next in a room with no walls and it does not invent a room — it comes back with the question “add walls first”. Give the step planner a real choice between a square corner cabinet and a blind corner cabinet and it hands you the choice, named both ways, rather than picking for you. Ask Emma a DIY question the written guide does not cover and she says she is not certain and points you at a human instead of composing something that sounds right.
None of that is modesty. It is that a wrong answer delivered fluently costs more than no answer, because you act on it. The sink rule is the same rule, in the one place where a wrong answer would fill your whole room.
Worth saying plainly, since this is the part people assume is magic: the automatic design needs you signed in, it works from the room you drew, and it is a starting layout rather than a finished kitchen. It gets the boxes on the walls in a sane order. Whether the drawer bank belongs left or right of the range is still a judgement, and it is still yours. The twelve mistakes chapter is the checklist to run over whatever it hands back.
“Hands-free” usually means somebody could not think of a real use case. Here the use cases are embarrassingly concrete, and they are all moments where the alternative is putting something down, climbing off something, or walking away and losing the thought.
Two honest limits belong here rather than in a footnote. Editing needs the voice call — the typing panel answers questions and has no tools at all, so it cannot be talked into changing your design. And a voice call needs speech, a signed-in account, microphone permission and a room quiet enough to be heard in, which a kitchen mid-renovation frequently is not. When it is too loud, the mouse is still there. The troubleshooting chapter covers the rest.
A wake word in a home is a promise about listening, so the design here is deliberately unexciting. Four rules, none of which we would like you to have to take on trust.
Because the wake word cannot work with the app closed, there is a Siri shortcut for exactly that gap: ask Siri to talk to Emma in the app and it opens her, again with the offer rather than an automatic call. It is set up in English, Chinese and French. That is the whole workaround, and it is honest about being one — Siri can open an app from the lock screen; a third-party app cannot listen from it.
The same no-surprises principle produced the call bar. Once a call is live, a bar lives at the root of the app with the running timer and a hang-up button on it, so wherever you have navigated to — the catalogue, a saved design, the quote — the call is visible and one tap from over. A call you cannot see is a call you can leave running by accident, and minutes that leave by accident are the fastest way to stop trusting a product.
The time itself works the way it does in the browser, because it is the same account: ten free voice minutes a day, resetting on the Toronto calendar day, then 1 GH Coin per five-minute block — and a block only renews if you actually spoke during it, and spoke recently. Voice calls are not recorded and no transcript is kept; typed conversations are kept. The full account of both is in the voice troubleshooting chapter and the privacy page.
It would be easy to write this section as though the app replaces the browser. It does not: they are good at opposite halves of the same job.
| The job | Tablet, in the room | Browser, at a desk |
|---|---|---|
| Getting the room on screen | She draws it while you talk — shape first, then wall lengths | You draw the walls yourself, with a mouse |
| Roughing in sink and appliances | Spoken, standing exactly where each one will go | Dragged, with the whole plan in front of you |
| Filling it with cabinets | Handed to the automatic design by voice | The same automatic design, same account |
| Nudging one cabinet by an inch | Possible, in spoken inch amounts | Faster with a mouse, and you can see the gap close |
| Colours, finishes, countertop | On screen — never a voice job | On screen, with room to compare two side by side |
| Reading the quote line by line | Possible | Where you should actually do it |
| Keyboard shortcuts | There is no keyboard | All of them |
| Languages on a voice call | Nine | Three |
| Scanning the room | On a device with a LiDAR sensor, the app can scan a room | Not something a browser can do |
Two rows deserve a sentence each. The language menu on a call in the app covers English, Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, French, Korean, Japanese, Hindi, Spanish and Portuguese; in the browser it is English, Mandarin Chinese and French. That is a real difference, and for a household that switches language halfway through an argument about the fridge, it is the difference that matters.
And the spoken coaching during a room scan is not the assistant at all — it is a local voice on the device, so it costs nothing and uses none of your minutes. Talking you round a room is a job a cheap thing does correctly; reaching for the expensive thing to do it would be a design mistake, not a feature.
What the browser keeps is unglamorous and decisive: a big screen, a mouse for the precision work, and every keyboard shortcut. Judging a colour on a 27″ display is a different act from judging it on a tablet held at arm’s length in a room lit by one bare bulb. Comparing two countertop materials wants both of them visible at once. Going through a quote line by line wants rows you can read without scrolling. The designer chapter is written for that half of the job.
The two halves are not two products. It is one account, one set of saved designs, one balance and the same ten free voice minutes a day — nothing in the app is a separate purchase, and a design saved on a tablet is the design you open on a laptop. The sign-in is Google, it is free, and a session lasts about eight hours, which is roughly one working day of a renovation.
So the sequence that actually works looks like this.
One thing does not change on either device, and it is the thing worth ending on. She cannot measure your room. She cannot judge whether the result looks nice — she reads a written statement of your design, not a picture of it. She cannot repaint a door, resize a cabinet or move a wall by voice. The tablet moves the drawing to where the facts are; it does not move the responsibility for the facts. That stays with whoever is holding the tape.
If you want the browser half in full detail first — every command, every refusal, and what she can read about your design — start with the command reference and what she actually sees. The planner is free, works signed out, and needs nothing installed.
Yes. Our browser planner runs in a tablet browser today, with nothing to install, and drawing walls, placing cabinets, the 3D view and the running quote all work signed out. There is also a native iPad and iPhone app, which adds voice drawing, a wake word and room scanning on devices with the sensor. That app is not on the App Store yet.
You cannot get it yet, and we would rather say that than imply otherwise. The iPad and iPhone app is not on the App Store, there is no download link, and we are not promising a date. The browser planner described throughout this guide works today on a phone, a tablet or a computer, uses the same account, and needs nothing installed.
In the app, yes. She can draw a room in one of four shapes: a single wall, an L, a U, or a G with a peninsula. Then she sets a named wall's length, puts the sink and appliances on a wall, moves or removes them, adds an island, clears the canvas, and hands the finished room to the automatic design. She takes the shape, the length and roughly how far along a wall something sits, and the app works out the geometry, so no coordinates are ever spoken. In the browser she edits an existing design rather than drawing the room.
Because a layout designed around no sink is not a kitchen layout. Handing the room to the automatic design requires a sink; without one it stops and asks where the sink goes. The sink decides which side the dishwasher lives on, where the working run sits and which corner takes the blind cabinet, so an automatic answer without it would look complete and be wrong, which is the most expensive kind of answer.
No, and it cannot. It is off by default, and when you turn it on it only listens while the app is on screen, because iOS never lets a third-party app listen when it is not running. Recognition happens on the device only: nothing is recorded and nothing is uploaded, and if your chosen language has no on-device model the app refuses to listen rather than sending audio to a server. Hearing the phrase opens the assistant and offers a call; it never starts one on its own.
Largely, on a voice call in the app. You can draw the room, set wall lengths, place the sink and appliances, hand it to the automatic design and then add, move, remove and undo cabinets, all by speaking. What still needs eyes and a pointer is the visual half: colours, finishes, countertops and reading the quote. The typing panel is not an alternative, because it answers questions and has no tools at all.
In the app the call has a language menu covering English, Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, French, Korean, Japanese, Hindi, Spanish and Portuguese. In the browser it is English, Mandarin Chinese and French. The wake word and the Siri shortcut are set up in English, Chinese and French.
No. It is one account, the same saved designs, the same balance and the same ten free voice minutes a day, resetting on the Toronto calendar day. Voice time beyond the free minutes is charged in GH Coin, at 1 coin per five-minute block, and a block only renews if you actually spoke during it. Nothing in the app is bought separately.
Both, in that order. The tablet is better where the facts are: measuring, drawing the shape, setting wall lengths and placing the sink and appliances while standing where they go. The computer is better for the slow half: a big screen for colour and countertop decisions, a mouse for inch-level nudges, every keyboard shortcut, and a quote you can read line by line. Save it under a name in the room and open it at the desk.
The planner opens in the browser you already have, on the tablet already in your hand. Walls, cabinets, 3D and the quote, with nothing to install.
Open the 3D planner →