What problem this solves
Floor plans look fine in plan view. The trouble is that human walking paths are not what you draw as “circulation” arrows on the plan — they are paths of least resistance, and they go around furniture in straight lines unless something blocks them. A 50 cm gap between a sofa and a coffee table feels “fine” until you actually have to pass a hot dish through it, at which point you discover the gap is half what you intended because the sofa cushion compresses under load and the table drifts 5 cm away from the wall each year. This tool models the room as a grid and finds the bottlenecks by computation, not by eye.
The 60 cm minimum is a conservative adult-passing width in socks and slippers. Wheelchair access requires 90 cm minimum (ADA) and ideally 1.5 m turning radius — this tool doesn’t model wheelchairs but the same choke-point logic applies: increase the threshold to 90 cm and rerun.
Who it’s for
- Residential designers placing furniture for an open-plan living/dining combo
- Hospitality designers laying out restaurant tables where servers carry trays
- Office space planners fitting desks into a small floor
- Homeowners trying to figure out if their new sectional will block the hallway
Why visual plans lie
Designers consistently underestimate how much space furniture takes once people are using the room. A sofa drawn as a 90×220 cm rectangle needs another 30 cm of “do not put anything here” zone behind it for someone to walk past. A dining chair pulled out adds 50 cm in front of the table. A rug with 60 cm of floor beyond it is wasted space for walking. The grid-based pathfinding in this tool catches these by simply modelling the room as cells you can’t walk through and cells you can.
Limitations
- Rectangles only; L-shaped or curved furniture is rendered as the bounding rectangle.
- Rotation is supported via the rotation field but the path search treats rotated rectangles exactly as drawn — no padding for sway.
- 12.5 cm grid is fine for big rooms but under-resolves tight bathrooms.
- Doors are modelled as zero-width points on the wall — door thickness and swing arc are not.
- No furniture under desk/table clearance; you can walk through a chair position because the chair isn’t modelled separately.
- Search is two-dimensional and flat — ramps and stairs need separate modelling.
Practical fixes for choke points
Most choke points appear in one of three places: between the sofa and the wall, between the dining table and the kitchen island, or in a hallway that gets pinched by a console table. The fix is usually to swap one of the bordering pieces for a smaller one (a 200 cm sofa instead of 240 cm) rather than moving everything. If the room is genuinely tight, replace the dining table with a backless banquette (people slide in/out without pulling the chair back 50 cm).