I Planned My Apartment in Figma (And I'd Do It Again)
A UX engineer moves into a new place and does the obvious thing: opens Figma. What I learned about spatial design by treating it like an interface problem.
When I moved into my new apartment, the first thing I opened was Figma.
This is probably not surprising if you know me. Figma is where I think spatially — where I arrange things, test compositions, compare options side by side. The question of how to configure a room is, at some level, the same kind of problem as designing an interface: you have a bounded space, a set of elements with fixed and flexible properties, and a set of human behaviors you’re trying to support or avoid.
So I imported the floor plan, set up a frame at 1:50 scale, and started working.
The floor plan as a canvas
The apartment came with architectural drawings. I traced the walls into Figma, marked the fixed points — windows, doors, radiators, electrical outlets — and then started placing furniture as components. Each piece of furniture became a frame with accurate proportions: the desk, the bed, the shelving units, the kitchen elements.
The advantage over paper sketching is immediate: you can duplicate an entire layout variant in two seconds, compare three configurations side by side, and share it with anyone who needs to weigh in. I went through around a dozen serious layout iterations before arriving at something that felt right.
Design principles that emerged from the process
Working through the layouts forced me to articulate why certain configurations felt better. I ended up with a set of principles I’ve been applying consistently:
Float elements when possible. Wall-mounted furniture or pieces with visible legs reveal the floor perimeter. A continuous floor plane reads as a larger room. A piece that disappears into the floor breaks that continuity.
Consolidate vertical mass. Tall storage units compress a room visually. One block of tall storage on one wall is fine; distributing tall pieces around the room makes it feel smaller and busier. Keep the rest low and continuous.
One clear sightline from entry to window. Leave at least one meter of open space along the main axis from the front door to the primary window. A room that reads as one continuous volume from entry feels significantly larger than the same dimensions with an obstruction in that path.
Limit materials, vary texture. Three materials maximum: one for surfaces (walls and ceiling), one for the floor, one for accents. Varying texture within a material is fine — varying color between multiple materials creates visual noise.
Align edges. Furniture, rugs, and lighting should run parallel to the room’s longest wall. Diagonal placement feels dynamic as a concept and chaotic in practice.
Curtains as architecture, not decoration. Full-height, wall-to-wall tracks. Stack to one side when open to read the window as a single opening. Curtains that stop at the window frame make the ceiling feel lower and the window feel smaller.
The kitchen
The kitchen planning was a negotiation between what the builder was offering and what I actually wanted. Figma became the communication layer — I could show exactly what I meant rather than describe it.
The main requests: all drawers below the counter instead of cabinet doors (significantly more ergonomic), a full-height backsplash in an inox/stainless effect, extra electrical outlets above the counter (essential for the smart home setup). One outlet conflict required routing power behind the fridge — a minor thing that would have been easy to miss without working through the layout in detail.
The color system
I settled on a small, explicit color meaning system early:
- Grey — structural, supportive, containing
- Wood — warmth, comfort, tactile presence
- Yellow accents — creative areas, good daylight zones
- Green — food-adjacent spaces (kitchen, dining)
This isn’t a decoration choice, it’s navigation. When you’re not consciously deciding what color something should be, you default to what’s in front of you. Having a small system means the decisions are already made.
What Figma can’t do
Scale and light. You can make a furniture layout that looks perfect in Figma and walks into the actual room to find that one piece blocks the window in a way you didn’t register, or that the light at 5pm hits something in a way the floor plan doesn’t capture.
I supplemented with REW (for the studio corner, where acoustics matter as much as aesthetics) and a lot of standing in the empty room at different times of day before committing to positions.
Would I recommend this workflow?
If you’re comfortable in Figma and you’re moving into a new space, yes. The benefits are real: spatial comparison at scale, easy iteration, sharable artifacts, and a discipline that forces you to think in precise dimensions rather than vague preferences.
The limitation is that it’s a 2D top-down view, which is better for layout than for atmosphere. I found myself switching between Figma for arrangement logic and Pinterest for mood reference — the two tools serve different kinds of spatial thinking.
The apartment is now configured. Most of the layouts I tested in Figma were discarded. A few principles I thought were rules turned out to be guidelines. One thing I was certain about turned out to be completely wrong once I was standing in the room.
That’s design.
The acoustic corner of this apartment has its own story — how I treated a square room with polyester panels and a desk rotation. That’s here. The home automation layer built on top of the whole space is here.