Your virtual room
Projections allow clients to walk around blueprints
Watching YouTube videos can lead to great things.
Cranberry resident Ron Lyndon was watching “Shark Tank Australia” when he saw an idea he thought he could make his own. The show featured two mates pitching their company, Life-size Plans. The basic idea is that clients could walk through blueprints projected onto a large space before building a house. It solved a big problem for nonarchitects: visualizing a space before it is built.
“I took the idea and adapted it after my wife and I talked about it,” Mr. Lyndon said. “This is the first of its kind in the United States.”
His company, Walkable Plans (www.walkableplans.com), is based in a 5,000square-foot space inside Pittsburgh Mills mall in Frazer that is essentially a giant projection room where architectural blueprints show up on the floor.
“It is full, life-size scale so an architect or builder can walk their clients through them and allow them to see their future space. This is not virtual reality or a 3D model. We project an exact scaled image of the floor plan onto our floor.”
Actually the projections are within 1 or 2% of the real thing. “That translates to a 1- or 2-inch difference.”
Walkable Plans allows builders and architects to take clients through everything from an addition to a full home. The cost to see your blueprints come to life is $1,200 per hour.
“The second hour is discounted to $800, but we do it in 15-minute increments so you just pay for what you need,” Mr. Lyndon said, noting that the cost for additions and other small projects is $600.
“Making changes at the blueprint stage is much cheaper than when the building starts,” he said.
Many homeowners have trouble visualizing size and space from blueprints. “The first clients who used the facility were building an 11,000-squarefoot home, a significant house,” Mr. Lyndon recalled.
“Our facility allows them to experience it in exact size including real furniture and walls.”
Sofas, chairs, a king-size bed, twin beds, tables and a coffee table are all on wheels so clients can get a feel for how things will fit into the rooms.
“We also have portable walls to help define the space,” he noted.
The response so far from
architects, builders and commercial builders has been very positive, Mr. Lyndon said. “The commercial builders are particularly interested because you can bring all of the decisionmakers into this space at one time to look at the plans and sign off right here.”
The core principles of construction and design have always interested Mr. Lyndon.
“I helped design part of a house my parents were building when I was 12. I have always liked home theaters, projectors and equipment and networking.”
After architects send plans over, it takes us about an hour to set it up.
“It costs a lot more to change something once the walls are up,” he noted. “Clients will walk into the house mid-construction and find something that is wrong or that they didn’t understand from the floor plans.
Change requests at that point get really expensive and cause delays.”
That can add up quickly on a large home, Mr. Lyndon said.
“The price of seeing your floor plans and walking through them is about the price of a refrigerator. When you are building a $400,000 or more home, this is cost-effective.”