Using the Sims to inspire your own home designs

The Sims was a game I played tirelessly as a child, and it turns out I wasn’t alone as there are around 33 million Sims players worldwide.

If you’ve ever played it, you know how addictive it can be! You’re in complete control of someone else’s life, and you can build their world, their home, their family, their personalities and so much more.

But the bit I used to spend the most time on? Creating their home. I loved using the classic ‘motherlode’ cheat, giving a family tons of money and then building them an insane home, complete with a pool, gym, library, balcony and so much more.

While this is all super fun and time consuming, could you actually use a game like the Sims to design your own home?

This is actually something I did when we purchased our current home, and then this week, a super interesting press release dropped into my emails, inspiring me to write this article.

 

Creating our home on the Sims

I chose to create our home on the Sims because we purchased it during a COVID lockdown. This meant that none of our family members could see it prior to us moving in, and so I created a virtual Sims tour especially for my parents. BUT it also allowed me to play about a bit with renovation ideas.

We have a plan to restructure our home slightly, making the kitchen and living space a bit bigger and including a utility room. Therefore, building our home as it is on a video game meant I could play about with layout ideas, which was so helpful.

Below, was just one of my ideas for our kitchen space:

What I love about the Sims is the ability to do what you want. Their choices of furniture, wallpapers and more is just huge, and you can pretty much change the colour of them all to suit what you want.

But how can the Sims really impact our home’s designs?

 

How can the Sims give you inspiration?

I’ve known Juan from Boreal Abode for some time now and he says:

“There is something fascinating about being in total control of your home’s design. In real life, we encounter barriers such as budget or space limitations. However, in a virtual world, we can push our creativity to the extreme. Home simulation games are the perfect sandbox to explore new ideas and styles. Plus, the amount of custom content from the community is huge. So you can have any building feature and every piece of furniture you can imagine.”

Unfortunately, as many of us love to build homes on the Sims, only 7% of our homes in the UK are custom built. A study from St. Modwen Homes found that this was mostly down to cost (a factor that isn’t required in Sims when you know the correct cheats…) and design (i.e. who would help them design it).

I’ve recently discovered the joy of watching people play Sims on TikTok, and Sarah Kendall has 160k followers – so it turns out I’m not the only one enjoying the Sims. She says that playing helps her to explore what she does and doesn’t like, and that these things can eventually be applied to her own home.

 

Additional information

St. Modwen Homes offers a new way of buying a home – the exterior of the property is constructed, and the interior is left completely to you to design, much like in the Sims. You can hire the help of architects and contractors to assist with this.

Mark O’Donnell, design manager at St. Modwen Homes, says:

As the way we live, work, and enjoy our homes changes and diversifies, we’ve recognised that the unique needs of homeowners require homes to reflect their wishes.

The position of walls, the number of rooms, and the types of furnishings are all left to the homeowner, while the structure of the property is built by our professional team.

The concept certainly reflects ideas similar to the Sims, where players can build shells of buildings and insert walls and doors based on their thoughts and tastes. It also moves away from the idea of a conventional new-build home, where design and construction are completed before moving day.