I Planned My Apartment in Figma (And I'd Do It Again)
I moved into a new place and did the obvious thing for a UX engineer: opened Figma. Treating the rooms like an interface problem gave me a set of rules I still use.
When I moved into my new apartment, the first app I opened was Figma.
If you know me, that won’t surprise you. Figma is where I think about space. It’s where I arrange things, try out compositions and compare options side by side. And laying out a room is a lot like designing an interface. You have a fixed area, some elements that can move and some that can’t, and people whose habits you’re trying to support.
So I imported the floor plan, set up a frame at 1:50 scale, and started.
The floor plan as a canvas
The apartment came with architectural drawings. I traced the walls into Figma and marked everything that couldn’t move: windows, doors, radiators, power outlets. Then I added the furniture as components, each drawn to scale: the desk, the bed, the shelving, the kitchen units.
Paper can’t keep up with this. I could duplicate a whole layout in two seconds, put three versions side by side, and send them to anyone who needed to weigh in. I went through about a dozen serious layouts before one felt right.
The rules that came out of it
Going through that many layouts made me put into words why some felt better than others. By the end I had a handful of rules, and I’ve stuck to them since.
Float furniture where you can. Wall-mounted pieces, or pieces on visible legs, let you see the floor run all the way to the wall. An unbroken floor makes a room read as bigger, and anything that sits solidly on the floor interrupts it.
Keep the tall stuff together. Tall storage makes a room feel smaller. One block of it on one wall is fine, but tall pieces scattered around make the room feel cramped and busy. Keep everything else low and continuous.
Keep one clear line from the door to the window. Leave at least a metre of open space along that path. A room you can see straight through from the entrance feels much bigger than the same room with something in the way.
Limit materials and vary texture. Use three materials at most: one for the walls and ceiling, one for the floor and one for accents. Texture can vary within a material, but every extra colour adds noise.
Line things up. Furniture, rugs and lights should run parallel to the room’s longest wall. Diagonal placement sounds dynamic and looks messy.
Treat curtains as part of the architecture. Use full-height, wall-to-wall tracks, and stack the curtains to one side when they’re open so the window reads as one opening. Curtains that stop at the window frame make the ceiling look lower and the window look smaller.
The kitchen
The kitchen was a negotiation between what the builder offered and what I wanted, and Figma became how I communicated. I could show exactly what I meant instead of trying to describe it.
I asked for drawers under the whole counter instead of cupboard doors, which is much easier to use. I wanted a full-height backsplash in a stainless steel finish, and extra outlets above the counter, which I’d need for the smart home setup. One outlet clashed with the layout, so the power had to run behind the fridge. That kind of thing is easy to miss unless you work through the layout in detail.
A small colour system
Early on I gave each colour a meaning:
- grey: structure, support, containers
- wood: warmth, comfort, things you touch
- yellow accents: creative spaces and areas with good daylight
- green: anywhere near food, like the kitchen and dining area
It’s less about decoration and more about making decisions in advance. When you haven’t decided what colour something should be, you end up with whatever happens to be in front of you. A small system means that choice is already made.
What Figma can’t show you
Figma can’t show you scale or light. A layout can look perfect on the canvas, and then in the real room you find a piece that blocks the window more than you expected, or 5pm sunlight hitting something the floor plan never hinted at.
So I also spent a lot of time standing in the empty rooms at different times of day before deciding where things went. For the studio corner, where sound matters as much as looks, I measured with REW too.
Would I do it again?
Yes, if you’re comfortable in Figma and you’re moving somewhere new. You can compare layouts properly, try things quickly, share them easily, and you’re forced to think in exact measurements instead of vague preferences.
The limit is that it’s a flat view from above. That’s good for layout and bad for atmosphere. I kept switching between Figma for how things fit and Pinterest for how they should feel. They’re answering different questions.
The apartment is set up now, and most of the layouts I made in Figma ended up in the bin. A few of the rules I thought were fixed turned out to be guidelines. One thing I was sure about turned out to be wrong the moment I stood in the room. I don’t think that’s a failure of the method. That’s just how design goes: you plan carefully, and then the real thing teaches you the rest.
The studio corner has its own story, about treating a square room with polyester panels and turning a desk 90 degrees. That’s here. The home automation built into the whole place is here.