Design your first kitchen
This is a guided first session in the 3D Kitchen Designer. By the end you'll have a named kitchen with walls, a run of priced cabinets, and a real total — ready to quote or turn into an order.
Availability: Build plan and up (badged Beta). You also need the Designer page permission. See Users & Roles.
Open the Designer from the Open Designer button in the top bar (right-hand action cluster, next to Create Order).
Step 1 — Name the kitchen
The moment a new design opens, a Name this kitchen prompt fills the stage. Type a name you'll recognize later — the customer or the job, like Smith Kitchen or Lakehouse Vanity — and press Start designing (or hit Enter).
You can't touch the room until you name it. That's on purpose: it stops your Designs library filling up with a pile of identical "Untitled kitchen" rows. You can rename the kitchen later from the top bar.
Tip: Press Cancel (or Esc) on this prompt to back out without creating anything — it returns you to the Designs list. There's no "skip"; a design always gets a real name before it's saved.
Step 2 — Draw the walls
A brand-new room greets you with a "Start by drawing your walls" card in the middle of the canvas. Until the first wall exists, the Editor, Inspector, and cabinet Library panels stay folded shut — there's nothing to configure in an empty room, so the Designer keeps them out of your way and points you at the one thing that matters.
Click the Draw walls button on that card (or pick the Draw walls tool in the toolbar), then lay out your room. You have two ways to set each wall's length:
- Drag — press, drag, and release to rubber-band a wall to length, or click point-to-point.
- Type an exact length — the field accepts plain inches (
120), fractions (12 1/2), or feet-and-inches (10' 6").
Each new wall continues from where the last one ended, so you can trace a room in one continuous chain. Press Escape to end the chain.
The empty-room card disappears the instant you arm the wall tool or draw your first wall, and the Editor, Inspector, and Library panels come to life.
For the full set of wall controls — snapping, right-click delete, setting an exact length, and adding windows and doors — see Walls, openings & views.
Step 3 — Place cabinets from the Library dock
With walls drawn, a cabinet Library dock appears along the bottom of the stage. It lists your shop's standard cabinet widths and families, and it stays on screen in every view so a cabinet is always one drag away.
Drag a width from the dock onto a wall or run to place a cabinet there. Keep dragging widths to build out the run. To fine-tune, drag the boundary between two cabinets to change a width, drag a whole cabinet to move it, or click one to open its Inspector.
Full details — reordering, resizing, corners, deleting, and per-cabinet overrides — are in Placing & editing cabinets.
Step 3, the fast way — Suggest a layout
Don't want to place cabinets one at a time? Press Suggest a layout in the toolbar. In a few seconds the Designer packs each wall with your shop's own standard widths, adds corner cabinets, and shows the result as a preview on the plan — already priced.
Review it, then choose:
| Choice | What happens |
|---|---|
| Use this layout | The suggested cabinets become your layout (a single undo step, if you change your mind). |
| Discard | The preview vanishes and nothing changes. |
Suggest a layout deliberately never wedges a filler into a run — it leaves any leftover wall for you to close yourself. If it can't fit anything (for example, a wall shorter than your smallest cabinet), it tells you why rather than doing nothing silently.
Tip: Suggest a layout is the fastest way to see the Designer work end to end. Draw four walls, press it, Use this layout, then jump to pricing.
Step 4 — Assign a material so it prices
Here's the single most important thing to understand about the Designer: your room shows $0 until you assign a material.
Cabinets price out of the box from standard construction — but "standard construction on what?" is the missing piece. Once you pick a whole-job material (Maple ply carcass, Walnut doors, and so on), the whole room prices itself instantly, run by run and cabinet by cabinet, and re-prices automatically every time you change the material.
Pick your whole-job material next — it's in the editor's Construction section and in the Quote & share panel. The full walkthrough is in Pricing a design.
Note: If your material picker is empty, your shop hasn't built its material library yet. An owner or admin sets it up once under Settings → Designer → Materials — see Catalog & designer settings.
Step 5 — Quote it or make it an order
With a price in hand, open the Quote & share panel from the button in the top bar. From there you can:
- Send the customer a Design Quote by email, or share a read-only link.
- Create an order from the design.
- Download the whole-room cut list (PDF or Excel) or run a CAM nest for the shop floor.
See Quotes, cut lists & CAM and From design to order.
Next Steps
- Walls, openings & views — the full wall and opening toolset
- Placing & editing cabinets — resize, move, delete, and per-cabinet overrides
- Pricing a design — assign a material and read the breakdown
- Quotes, cut lists & CAM — turn a design into deliverables
- The Designs library — find and reopen your saved kitchens