The design IS the page
A rail of six doors — Design, Outside, Plan, Furnish, Light, Share. Tools live inside as tabs; everything floats, nothing takes width from the canvas. The house is the interface.
Why we built Builder
A designer in a tab.A sun you can trust.
Builder exists for two reasons. First: the decisions around a house are made around kitchen tables, on the plot, on phones — so the designer has to run where those people already are. In a browser tab, with nothing to install. Second: most pictures of houses lie about the light. Builder computes the real sun instead. This page is the honest argument — including the comparison we get asked for most.
Three bets we staked the product on.
1. The browser bet
The old way: download, install, activate, update — on the one machine that holds the licence. Builder: a designer runs in a tab. Open the editor and a house builds itself in front of you — draw walls, cut real openings, fit a roof, furnish it. Three.js on WebGL2, ES modules served via importmap: no bundler, no build step, no install, no plugin. The plot visit happens on a phone; the evening session happens on the same link.
2. The honest-sun bet
The old way: staged light, chosen to flatter the picture. Builder: real ephemeris. Solar and lunar positions from the Meeus low-precision series — about 0.01° on the sun. Pick a place, a date and an hour, and the shadows are the ones the building would really cast on that plot, that day. Sun colour follows elevation — white at noon, gold at 12°, orange on the horizon. Play the day in 15, 45 or 120 seconds; night is real too: 1,400 stars fade in through civil twilight and the moon lights with its true lit fraction. Our QA checks the physics — equinox sunrise due east, polar day and night, midsummer in Warsaw 04:14–21:01.
3. The provenance policy
The rule: every design in the catalogue is original. The 140 ready houses cover the Polish-market typology — single storey, attic, two storey; gable, hip, flat and shed roofs; none, one or two garage bays — because that is what the market actually builds. What we will not do is copy a named studio's protected design. The typology belongs to the market; the drawings are ours. The 381 furnishing models are CC0, and everything stays editable once placed.
The design decisions
Decisions we don't reverse.
Real geometry, not baked pictures
Walls are a graph — T and X junctions split, corners mitre, collinear walls merge. Openings are real CSG booleans. Roofs auto-fit the exact perimeter. Because you edit live geometry, nothing can be pre-rendered: the picture is computed while you watch.
The sun is computed, not staged
Meeus ephemeris, a 4,096² shadow map fitted to the site (~2 cm/texel over a 45 m radius), and exactly one shadow-casting light at a time. QA gates the physics, not just the frame rate.
The catalogue is honest
140 original house designs, 381 CC0 models with baked ambient occlusion, 64 procedural PBR finishes. Original means original: no named studio's protected design is copied — the range covers the typology, not someone's signature house.
Editing is one switch, off by default
A design opened from a link looks the same to everybody. Arming is deliberate — the Design door, the B key, or a tool key — and never remembered between visits. Viewers write nothing; the server enforces it.
Your work stays yours
Autosave, scoped undo and redo on every change, Ctrl+S when you want it. Designs travel as *.webhome.json files, and ?design=<url> opens any shared design. If you leave, your work leaves with you.
The honest comparison.
Two neighbours get compared to Builder most often: baked-look showrooms and desktop CAD. Both are good at what they were built for. One structural fact explains most of the table: Builder is a designer — it edits live geometry, so nothing can be pre-baked. The picture exists only while you watch it, computed from the walls you actually drew.
| Capability | Builder | Baked-look showrooms | Desktop CAD |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nothing to install | ✓ a browser tab | ✓ a browser tab | ✗ installer, licence, one machine |
| Edits live geometry — walls, openings, roofs | ✓ wall graph + real booleans | ✗ scenes are rendered offline before you arrive — live geometry is exactly what cannot be pre-baked | ✓ full toolset |
| The real sun on your plot, your date | ✓ Meeus ephemeris, ~0.01°, real shadows | ✗ baked light — one staged look | Possible with render add-ons, and time |
| Share a link and edit together | ✓ live rooms, roles, permission areas, 8 voice seats | View links, no co-editing | ✗ files, exports, meetings |
| Walk through it first-person | ✓ WASD, doors, third person | Canned video fly-through | Possible, rarely quick |
| Learning curve | ✓ six doors, guided tools | ✓ nearly none — which is the point | ✗ real training investment |
| Works offline | ✗ needs the tab — we name this trade | ✓ | ✓ |
| Cost to start | ✓ free: open any of the 140 houses | Freemium, upsells per scene | ✗ licence up front |
| Decades of drawing documentation | Not our claim — the file is *.webhome.json | ✗ | ✓ their home ground |
- "Baked-look showrooms" = web configurators that pre-render their scenes offline and stream the pictures. Gorgeous, and frozen.
- "Desktop CAD" = installed architecture suites. Decades of depth — and an install, a licence and a learning curve.
- Never disparaged, only traded: the showroom wins on effortlessness, CAD wins offline and on documentation. Builder wins the loop — design, sun, share — in one tab.
Principles we don't trade away.
- The browser is the workstation — no install, no plugin, on any device you own
- The sun is computed — real ephemeris, real shadows, real night — never staged
- Designs are original — Polish-market typology, never a named studio's protected design
- The canvas keeps its width — floating UI, six doors, no chrome walls
- AI must perform an op you can undo — and every placement is re-checked geometrically before it lands
- The file format is open — *.webhome.json in, *.webhome.json out
- Every number on this site maps to a shipped feature and a QA gate
"We would rather show you the shadow your house will really cast on a Tuesday in October than a beautiful picture of better weather."
— Builder product thesisStand on the plot
yourself.
Open the designer — a house builds itself, then it's yours to change. Free to look at any of the 140 designs.