An analogue room planner kit makes designing your dream home a doddle

Planora, the ingenious new room planner kit, is the brainchild of three Stockholm-based architects – Matilda Falck, Victor Lindén, and Anna Bärring. Conceived during the pandemic, when the industry slowed down, leaving the Swedish architects with more time on their hands and brainspace for blue-sky thinking, Planora is designed to become the ultimate planning tool for those looking to conceptualise their new home without constantly looking at a screen.

The product is simple – and refreshingly easy to understand. It comprises a series of precisely scaled pieces made from wood, which users can pop out and use on their floorplan. It allows the user to try out layouts and play with different spatial arrangements as they imagine their daily life and the use of each architectural interior in a new design.

Room planner kit Planora – meet the makers

Emphasising collaborative, real-time, in-person working and the physical qualities of the process of architectural design, Planora’s founders call their project a 'quiet counter-movement'. We caught up with them to discover the thinking behind their product.

Wallpaper*: What inspired you to create Planora? How did it all start?

Planora team: A few years ago, during a slowdown in the building industry, our architecture practice suddenly had fewer projects on the table. We’re not the kind of team that sits and waits for work to arrive, so we started asking ourselves what we could create that still connected to our everyday architectural work.

In our private client projects, we kept seeing the same pattern: people would arrive with their first ideas sketched on paper – imaginative, enthusiastic, but usually not to scale and with proportions that didn’t quite hold together. Which is completely understandable; that’s the part architects are meant to resolve.

But it revealed something important: people love imagining their homes. They want to sketch, experiment and play with spatial ideas – yet not everyone wants to wrestle with software or think about scale on paper.

So we asked ourselves: what if spatial thinking could be effortless? What if there were a tactile, intuitive tool that allowed anyone to sit down, move pieces around, and test ideas without any technical knowledge? That became Room Planner, our first product.

The system grew naturally from there – Kitchen Planner, Garden Planner, Bathroom Planner, and a series of add-on packs that allow people to expand their toolkit depending on the project. As the collection evolved, we needed a unifying identity for this growing ecosystem of planning tools. That became Planora.

W*: Was it straightforward to create, once you had the initial idea? Or did it take many tests to reach its final form?

P: The concept came quickly – we knew exactly the kind of experience we wanted to create. As architects, we work with these shapes every day – furniture, walls, doors, circulation – all in digital drawing form. Translating that familiar architectural language into a physical, hands-on format felt natural.

The refinement, however, took time. We experimented with different sizes, proportions, edge treatments and packaging formats. Finding the right balance between usability, durability and aesthetic clarity became its own design journey. We also wanted the experience to feel playful and inspiring – something that encouraged people to explore.

The packaging, in particular, went through several iterations, as it needed to be both practical and considered enough to live comfortably on a shelf or coffee table. It wasn’t difficult so much as meticulous. The final product is the result of countless small decisions that all had to feel just right.

W*: Why is it in the specific material?

P: Being Swedish architects, wood is part of our design DNA. It’s a material we work with constantly, and it carries a warmth, tactility and sense of craft that felt essential for Planora.

Because the product is entirely hands-on, the material had to feel good to touch. Wood slows you down in a way that screens can’t – it invites focus. Many customers describe the experience as calming or even meditative – like a puzzle game or a refined, grown-up take on Lego.

We also wanted Planora to be more than a practical tool. It should be beautiful on the table, giftable, display-worthy – something that belongs in a design-led home. Choosing wood allowed us to achieve that blend of functionality, craft and aesthetic presence.

W*: What kind of feedback have you received for it, perhaps from a user or client?

P: We hear from customers every day, and certain themes surface again and again: how tactile and intuitive the system feels; how therapeutic it is to plan without screens; how surprising it is to feel proportions rather than simply see them; how valuable it becomes during a renovation or new-build process

The most common criticism tends to come from people who question the analogue nature of the product – why not just use an app? Our answer is that we’re not trying to replace digital tools; we’re offering a different mode of thinking. A tactile, slowed-down way of working that many of us have lost along the way. And increasingly, people are seeking exactly that – less screen time, more physical engagement, more clarity.

Some also mention that it could be improved with magnetism. We are addressing exactly this for next year.

W*: Are there plans for future products within the family?

P: Absolutely. We refine the products continuously, both in terms of usability and the overall experience. Some upcoming updates focus on making the kits even more intuitive and fluid to work with. We also listen closely to our community. Many people reach out with highly specific needs – restaurant layouts, office environments, niche furniture pieces. While not every idea can become a standalone product, these suggestions help us understand how different groups want to use Planora, and they inform our long-term direction. We’ve already introduced add-ons such as extra furniture, building elements and people in response to this feedback.

A central red thread for us is building a coherent system of tools – planners that work beautifully on their own, but even better together. This modular approach allows people to expand their toolkit depending on the project they’re working on, rather than being tied to a single fixed format. We're also working on introducing a full metric-based system alongside the current format, giving users even more flexibility depending on their region and design habits.

In parallel, we have a couple of potential collaborations in development – including one exploring how Planora can support learning environments. It’s early days, but we’re excited about how analogue spatial tools can be used in education. Beyond these ongoing improvements, we have a major evolution of the collection planned for 2026. It represents a significant step forward in how the system functions and how users can personalise and build upon it – something we’re very excited to share in due course.

The full range of room planners is available at planorashop.com