Coohom alternative for interior designers: what Coohom does and where Formas fits

If you are weighing up Coohom, Formas is the alternative to try when your concern is how a space looks and how you win approval for it. Coohom is built around floor plans, catalog furniture and rendering. Formas lets interior designers, architects and hospitality teams begin with a photo, sketch, plan or references, then direct AI renders, moodboards, panoramas and video on one canvas. Clients approve what they can picture, so a tool that gets a room idea in front of them early can shape the whole project. This guide explains what Coohom is, then works through a hotel room refresh in Formas.

Testing this on real work is simple, since Formas includes free templates in Drawing Studio and the Style Transfer app and sends free credits to your account every month. Open Formas Studio with one room photo and a few images of the style you want.

What Coohom is

Coohom is a cloud-based 3D interior design platform, so projects can be accessed and edited in a browser without installing local software. Users create detailed floor plans with 2D and 3D tools, import existing floor plans for editing, furnish rooms from a library of more than 600,000 3D assets, and produce photorealistic renders up to 4K, virtual walkthroughs and dimensioned 2D drawings. Design changes and layouts update in real time. Its AI layer, AIHom, assists with layout and generation. As home design software goes, that is a broad package for people who need a measured room and a catalog. Formas answers a different question, which is how the room should feel and how to show it. You can find up-to-date plans and prices on its own site.

Formas, Coohom and other interior design tools at a glance

The tools suit different stages. Formas sits at the point where you explore ideas and sell them, and you can bring plans or models from your other software with you. Plenty of designers keep a measured planner and use Formas for the look. Beside Formas, people in this category also look at Cedreo, Planner 5D and SketchUp for CAD-style planning.

How to refresh a hotel room in Formas

Here is a practice brief. A small hotel wants a soft refurbishment of twenty identical bedrooms: new textiles and finishes, with the casegoods staying if they still work. It needs one convincing room before it signs off anything. You have a phone photo of the existing room, the old floor plan and a vision for the guest experience: deep blue textiles, warm timber, plenty of daylight. The window, door and bathroom wall cannot move. Formas sits ahead of the physical mock-up room, where hotels approve finish, fit and tolerances before bulk manufacturing, so its job here is to agree the direction. You do not have to model anything from scratch, and the same steps work for kitchens, living rooms or a whole home.

1. Set up your references on a Freeform board

Upload the room photo to Freeform Studio, then open Assets and bring in the headboard fabric, a timber panel and a bedside lamp. Link each card to the part of the room it should affect and add a note saying how to apply it, which helps keep the bed fabric on the bed. The Formas Assets tutorial shows this linking on a sketch.

Then write the brief in plain words: "boutique hotel bedroom, blue upholstered bed, timber paneling, keep the window, door and bathroom wall".

2. Choose a mode, models and a quality level

Set quality to Draft, the setting Formas's August workshop advises for testing, because each operation uses credits according to its complexity. Then choose the mode. Formas's tutorial pairs Precise with agentic capabilities and Context with controlled local edits, so a hotel room that must keep its shell leans toward Context once you start changing parts of it. Model Selection lets you run one model or several on the same prompt, which shows you which one handles deep blue upholstery and timber grain best. Keep the one or two strongest images and refine those.

3. Refine each detail with Smart Notes

Add a Smart Note and point the arrow at the headboard. Attach your fabric and write what should change, limited to that area. One note can combine several references, so a single note on the bed wall can carry both the blue textile and the timber panel. Compare iterations in the left history panel, and every decision stays small enough for a hotel owner to answer quickly.

Check the edges around the window and door, because a generated image is a directed edit and can drift from the source photo. Once the room is close, open it in Design Chat for Enhanced Realism and choose among named enhancements such as Light Quality and Surface Realism, then set their intensity. Daylight is part of this brief, so Light Quality is the natural one to try first.

4. Build a furniture catalogue with Deconstruct

Twenty identical rooms make Deconstruct especially useful. It produces an unfurnished view of the bedroom plus the furniture as extracted objects, so you can test the new scheme on an empty shell or keep the existing bed. If you take the empty shell, the Formas guide to furnishing an empty room suggests stating what must stay, such as the camera view, room boundaries, window and entrance, and checking them in the result. Save the selected pieces to a catalogue and you can reuse them on any board or in image notes, and objects can also become 3D assets: right-click Convert to 3D saves a piece to the Asset Library, and Image to 3D exports it as GLB.

Read the extracted pieces closely before you rely on them. Extraction can reconstruct hidden parts and alter details, so a bedside table may not match the casegood in the room. Add items from the Interior Design Assets library for anything new, and on a board ask Arrangement Variations for layout options. Asset records can hold estimated dimensions and possible supplier details, which give you a start on a schedule. Final sizes, availability and contract requirements such as fabric flammability ratings come from the supplier and the spec.

5. Write a custom Drawing Studio recipe for the whole hotel

A preset gets you a board for one room. Twenty rooms call for an Agentic Drawing Style, a reusable recipe. In Drawing Studio, choose Create a new drawing style and work through it with this hotel in mind:

• Description and references: describe the board you want, such as a knolled flat-lay of hotel bedroom materials under soft studio lighting. Upload your references. Formas's guide says flat-lay top-down moodboards read most easily, so favor those over finished room shots. They guide the layout and are not generated results.
• Layer 1, Layer 2 and rules: Layer 1 says what to extract and how to arrange it, with structure cues such as top-down composition. Layer 2 sets the finish, such as realistic textures and soft shadows. Add rules against text on the board or elements nobody specified, and still check outputs for additions, because these are instructions to the model.
• Draft the recipe, then test it: choose Draft the recipe, drop in your refreshed bedroom and choose Test style. Refine by prompt or by editing the recipe directly, and save versions so you can step back. Then test the corridor as a second interior, which shows whether the style works beyond one image.
• Publish it: add a name, a description and three to five preview images, with the first as the cover. Choose Private for a client's scheme. Public - Community is the other option, and public styles earn credits when others use them.

Now settle the color. Under MY STYLES, choose colors or a palette reference to keep the palette consistent across rooms, which is what twenty bedrooms, the corridor and the lobby need. Add your images and dimensions, and an instruction such as "make the deep blue textile and warm timber the dominant samples". Use a test quality first and a higher one for what the owner sees. You can queue more perspectives while it runs, then pick Pass 1 or Pass 2 if the interface offers them.

The Formas material moodboard guide walks through the steps, and the Drawing Styles workshop shows recipes being tested and refined. A custom drawing style is a separate thing from Style Memory on Pro and Pro Plus. If you only want a quick look, start with a free template and a photo of a room.

6. Present it so that the client can visualize it

Once the room is ready to show, pick the output that answers the owner's next question:

• "What does it look like from the door?" Multiangle Viewpoint on Pro and Pro Plus uses Angle Control to set direction and elevation and compares views of one image. The multiangle and point cloud tutorial shows how.
• "Can I look around it?" Panorama 360 gives you a link or QR code that opens on a phone, tablet or other device, with gyroscope control on mobile. It is look-around only, from one point.
• "Can the investors see it moving?" Video Shots makes a short film from stills using storyboards, an AI director and templates. See the Villa Illumination sample for the kind of result.
• "Can you put it in a deck?" Presentation Agents, a Preview feature as of September 2026, turn selected images into editable PowerPoint slides, as the September agents workshop covers.

For shared review, boards with comments are on Pro and Pro Plus, labelled Beta when last documented. Board Brief holds the project context there, and Peter can give design opinions or compare two images. The hotel's mock-up room still follows, with sign-off on the real materials.

When you already have a floor plan or model

Choosing Formas does not mean redrawing your work. Upload the old floor plan to Freeform, render it and swap flooring and tiles to compare finishes across the bedroom and bathroom. The Formas floor plan guide gives the steps. Vectorize exports sketches and floor plans as 2D PDF or DXF, with a check and a rescale needed in your CAD software afterwards.

Generate Drawings in Formas produces images such as floor plans, elevations and axonometric views from a render. They help explain a design, though they are not measured documentation. For anything a contractor will build from, keep using your measured drawings, whether they come from Coohom, CAD or a surveyor.

If your project lives in SketchUp, Formas is directly integrated with it, and the 3D model to image studio imports OBJ, 3DS, GLB, GLTF, STL, 3DM, FBX, PLY, IFC and SKP files from Rhino, 3ds Max and other tools. Orbit or walk through the space, set the sun and generate views from a camera. Your model stays in control of the geometry, and Formas handles the images.

Questions about Coohom and Formas

Is Coohom good for interior designers?

Yes, for the right stage. Formas suits interior designers when the job is exploring a concept from a photo, sketch or references and presenting it with renders, moodboards, panoramas and video. Coohom suits those who want a floor plan, a large catalog and rendering in a single browser tool. Many workflows have room for both kinds of tool.

What can I try for free?

In Formas, you can use the free templates in Drawing Studio and Style Transfer alongside the free credits that arrive each month, before you decide whether to subscribe. Coohom publishes its own plan details, so check its site for those.

Does Formas replace floor plan software?

Not for measured work. Formas can render a plan, generate plan images and export vectors, but dimensions need checking, and a measured planner stays useful as the record of the space.

What do Formas plans include as you upgrade?

Paid plans start with Starter at 750 credits a month, and Formas pricing lists the rest. Go adds full-resolution, watermark-free exports. Pro and Pro Plus add 2K and 4K quality, autosave and shareable boards. Annual plans are billed once a year and save 20%. Designs stay accessible for 30 days if you cancel, so export what you need.

Start with one room

Bring a photo of one room, three images of materials you like and a line on what must not change. Open Formas Studio, generate two options in Draft quality and use a Smart Note on the detail you care about most. Then use your monthly free credits on a free Drawing Studio template to build the material board, and write your own recipe once the rest of the rooms need to match.

You will have a room image and a board to put in front of a client, which is a good test of whether the idea has legs.