alt Hacker NewsLaunch HN: Drafted (YC P26) – Models for residential architecture
I’m Nick, founder of Drafted (https://www.drafted.ai). We’re training models that generate residential architecture from structured design constraints.
Product demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QkJ7jNU9y4
Residential architecture is still one of the most expensive, slow, and inaccessible creative processes in the world. Designing a custom home typically costs $10,000–$50,000 or more, takes months, and requires making major decisions before most people can even visualize the outcome. As a result, the vast majority of homes are built without direct architectural involvement.
Our goal is to teach computers how the built environment works so anyone can imagine, explore, and eventually create physical spaces tailored to them.
Today, users can design homes using simple inputs such as: - Square footage targets - Footprint shapes - Lot boundaries - Room placement preferences - Spatial relationships and constraints.
Our models generate complete floor plans and matching exterior elevations in seconds. Users can explore designs in both 2D and 3D, iterate instantly, furnish interiors, experiment with materials, and export CAD, PDF, and other files for the rest of the pre-construction process.
One of our newest capabilities allows users to draw any footprint shape and generate a complete home layout inside it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZJhBm7-OHI.
Over the past month, more than 120,000 people have used Drafted, generating over 325,000 home designs.
If you're building a home, developing property, working in architecture, construction, or AI, we'd love to hear your feedback!
Comments
There is probably more money in this as entertainment than architecture. And less liability.
How many of us have made house plans at some point?
I just looked at the very first one featured on your website ("Sprawling Dark 5 Bed")[1]:
- A car parked in the garage perpendicular to the door and the other differently-sized car
- A bedroom missing a closet
- Attached bathrooms with multiple sinks
- An office with a weird entrance from a dead space from the garage
- External doors that open the wrong way (against fire code in most places)
- Closet doors opening inward
- Both doors of the top-left bathroom opens into the sinks (why two sinks?)
- The top-left bathroom has a weird dead space between the shower and bathtub (why both?)
- the random little floating feature in the middle of the open floorplan space doesn't make any structural or aesthetic sense
- The two bedrooms in the lower left with the weird bump-out for the windows that make no sense
- The window placement for many windows don't make sense and don't even line up with the 3D view of the house
- The hallway on the left that turns and goes to nowhere for no reason
- The additional random inaccessible dead spaces next to the bottom right bathroom
It took me just a few minutes to see this. I hope nobody ever builds a home based on these plans.
[1] https://cdn.drafted.ai/thumb/drafts/23025/generations/94729/...
Edited for formatting, to add a few points I missed, and to add a link to the image
This is fun! I hadn't thought about how much possibility space there was in home layouts until now. Some layouts make a lot more sense than others.
I've thrown some weird setups at it like a high bedroom:bathroom ratio and it's doing a great job at distributing bathroom access between the bedrooms, and arranging the bedrooms around shared spaces.
Thanks for sharing.
im currently building a home. one of the biggest issues is FAR which is very much driven by local laws. are you intending on addressing that at some point ?
looks great btw. congrats
Going to give it a try! Would love to see an option for an engineering stamp for brace walls, hold downs, etc.
This is really cool!
First thing that came to mind is that I would use this for a sim city style video game
ADU's are extremely popular in California. Are you going to add support for designing ADU/garage conversions?
This is interesting and cool for entertainment, but it's extremely hard to picture using this as a replacement for an architect.
We're building an ADU right now and the floorplan design was a very small part of what our architect did. So much more of the value came from the relationships he has with the structural and geotechnical engineers we used as well as the relationship with our city building department.
This really strikes me as a product in search of a problem.
Maybe a homeowner could use this for initial planning before finding an architect to use, but at that point you're competing with pencil and paper.