Background
With an educational background in architecture and interior design, Stefani Thatcher was first introduced to SoftPlan in 1999 when she and her husband were working towards building their first home. A few years later, Stefani was hired by an up-and-coming general contractor and fellow SoftPlan user to start up the in-house design department for their custom home building business. Stefani was also tasked with designing the starting lineup for a new sister company that focused on production homes.
In 2015, Stefani left to start her own independent residential design business, Domani Home Design. Since then, she has designed nearly 100 custom homes and is currently working on branching out her services to help other aspiring designers learn how to become successful residential designers.
Experience with SoftPlan
While it's hard to remember the early years of using SoftPlan, I don't remember feeling too much frustration which enabled me to continue working in the program. It was quite intuitive and easy to learn the basics. I felt like I was able to produce a decent set of floor plans with a very small learning curve.
That being said, I also had very low expectations for my finished product, so the end product I was producing wasn't that great, to be honest. But I learned. Bit by bit, I incrementally learned one more new feature at a time to get better and improve my end results.
As of this date, I am 90% finished assembling a SoftPlan template project file to expedite my workflow and decrease my production time.
Benefits of SoftPlan
On the benefits of SoftPlan, Stefani says, “I use SoftPlan because I want to be time-efficient” and “because of the ability and ease I have to work remotely with other associate, independent residential designers through the cloud-based file sharing functionality.”
Continuing, Stefani also lists SoftPlan’s compatibility with other industry programs, keyboard shortcut commands that increase efficiency, and custom scales for completed floor plans as other useful benefits.
Discussing how SoftPlan helps her stay competitive, Stefani mentions the 3D design experience SoftPlan offers, including new virtual reality capabilities that allow her clients to get a more realistic understanding of their new home design. She says, “For some of my clients who struggle with visualization, they really appreciate the VR viewing options.”
Discussing roof design, Stefani says, “[With SoftPlan] I can design a roof in minutes where I’ve been told by users of other BIM CAD programs that designing roofs takes up to a full working week of time.”
