Welcome to our list charting the very best home plan websites out there where you can search and buy residential blueprints!
We know that the process for designing and building a new home is a long road, so we want to help you get started on the right path. The starting point is pinning down a budget, house style and size. From there you add your must-have features.
If you already have a building lot or have a unique building lot such as narrow or corner lot, you need to choose a house plan accordingly. One great way to help you start designing and ultimately building your dream home is browsing and then buying a house plan (as you’ll see below, you can buy many house plans online).
To get you started, below we list out our 28 favorite home plan websites. What I love about these sites is you can see the floor plans for free. If you like what you see, then you buy.
This might not come as a big surprise, but we spend a lot of time thinking about, researching and looking at homes, including architecture and house plans.
Our list…
We hope you find exactly what you’re looking for, whether you’re building a new home or modifying an existing one.
1. ArchitecturalDesigns: This company has been around for 40 years, selling the widest range of home plans out there. It’s a truly comprehensive collection, and they offer a deep FAQ and search guide for the entire process. This is the godfather of home plan sites.
2. Home Stratosphere’s House Plans: We now offer house plans for sale. We feature a large and fast-growing collection of all kinds of house plans – all home styles, sizes, features, etc.
3. The House Designers: This site is comprehensive and deep in its selection of house plans with many plans that are exclusive to them. The site includes a a wealth of information on house building, legal issues, and everything else under the sun that has to do with house plans. It’s a no-frills but rewarding experience to shop here.
4. Donald A. Gardner: Donald Gardner Architects Inc. has been designing homes for over 40 years. Because they design their own house plans, many of their offerings are exclusively available at DonGardner.com.
5. Homeplans: Similar to Architectural Designs, this is a fully comprehensive index of home plans, offering over 28,000 plans to choose from in any style of architecture. One unique feature is that the site boasts curated collections centered on a theme, from southern living to ultimate kitchens.
6. Coolhouseplans: This site gets straight to business, free of any fluff to obscure your search for the perfect home plans. There’s a rather detailed search form right on the main page, plus an extensive list of subcategories if you just want to start browsing to find something you’ll like. The visual appeal might look old school, but the section is right up to date.
7. ePlans: Like many of the sites on this list, you’ll first see some bright and colorful home imagery and a useful search box when you arrive. In addition to home plans, you’ll find step-by-step guides to home building, including every aspect from financing to finishing.
8. Better Homes & Gardens House Plans: BHG threw their hat into the home plan game and comes up with a very solid effort. Similar to ones listed above, you’ll see an in-depth search box and listings of the varied categories. Once you’ve selected a home plan, you can choose an array of options, from foundation choices to the amount and type of hard copies you’ll get.
9. Builder House Plans: Builder features a gorgeous selection of house plans that can be, of course, searched and sorted by categories. What’s more, they offer selections of plans that are organized by specific designers, which is a fantastic option if you’re a fan of a particular designer’s style. They also offer the ability to customize any plan on the site.
10. Frank Betz Associates Inc: This site is highly focused, with the requisite search box and categories to scour, plus a large guide to the company’s latest designs. While there is less selection here than at the larger aggregate sites, there’s a more personal touch and attention to detail with their plans.
11. Monster House Plans: With a selection of over 24,000 house plans, many available in 3D “Intelligent” plans, you won’t come up short on variety here.
12. HousePlans.co: The biggest and boldest feature of this site is the ability to create a “3D model of a real house design,” somewhat similar to the previous site’s offering. The big advantage here is that you’ll be far more able to accurately visualize the home that results from a given plan. The site offers additional services, like modifying existing plans and marketing your own home designs.
13. Family Home Plans: Similar to many other entries on this list, Family Home Plans offers both a broad listing of categories of homes, garages, and outdoor project plans, plus a filter-happy search box to find just what you’ll need in its database. We like the extra attention paid to garages and outdoor plans.
14. Concept Home: This site, in addition to their collection of expertly designed home plans, has a guide on starting a home project, in addition to other FAQs and informational posts. The home plans are sorted by category and the smaller selection is balanced by consistency.
15. Archway Press: With over 600 listed house plans and a bevy of very easy checkbox-style search options for narrowing them down (think Amazon), you’ll be able to find what you like quickly and directly here. There are a number of detailed purchase options and a selection of garage plans as well.
16. DFD House Plans: Here’s another comprehensive style house plans collection from across a spectrum of designers. As the name implies, Direct From Designers features a surfeit of original plans. You can search them by category, designer, or even architectural style.
17. Designs Direct: This site offers a good selection of house plans in a simple, no-frills package with a handful of home photo tour examples and a list of the specific designers featured on the site, if you wanted to focus on one company’s projects.
18. Drummond House Plans: Drummond features a broad selection of house plans that are easily searched and sorted via checkboxes, plus a clean and simple design that gets out of the way, allowing you to browse directly to what you’re looking for. They’ve got a before and after gallery, plus a function for customizing any design on the site.
19. The Plan Collection: Similar to many others on this list, The Plan Collection is a comprehensive collection of plans in a large variety of styles, architectural designs, and sizes. Its best tool is that you can browse floor plans by specific feature.
20. Dream Home Source: Dream Home Source is a beautiful website with a detailed and highly precise list of home plan styles and designs set into an attractive and easy to navigate website. The site also has a curated Featured Designers page and a special collection of particularly unique designs.
21. The House Plan Shop: We really like the look of this site, with a bright clean design and lots of pictures. The house plans are grouped by architecture style in big bold lists, with a quick search function built into every page as well. If you enter your email for a free membership, you can save Favorites and keep them in a shopping cart for future reference.
22. House Plan Gallery: Like many others on this list, House Plan Gallery offers a customizable search box for their selection of home plans, but they also drop in a substantial list of FAQs on pretty much every aspect of the process, from planning to building to buying.
23. House Plans And More: This site has a great photo and video gallery to supplement its listing of house plans. The listings themselves can be searched, divided by style or feature, and browsed by eye catching photo galleries. They’ve also got additional projects, like barns, decks, and outdoor furniture.
24. Sater Design: We really enjoy the fact that this site is focused solely on luxury homes, with a selection ranging from smaller but richly detailed houses to sprawling Spanish Colonials and three-story Victorian homes. The company also offers the option to customize any plans and to create your own with their custom design services.
25. Southern Living House Plans: Famed magazine and website “Southern Living” also sells house plans. They offer an extensive collection and showcased in an easy-to-use website.
26. Floorplans.com: This site offers a large collection of many home styles. Its presentation is quite user-friendly with excellent home search functions at the top which helps narrow down visitors’ searches which is helpful given the huge inventory.
27. Houseplans.com: As the name suggests, Houseplans.com sells house plans and tons of them. Not only that, it’s a fairly popular website within this large industry. It attracts quite a lot of visitors largely due to its huge inventory.
28. Homeplans.com: I like the style of this website. It’s beautify as well as easy-to-use. You can search by style, number of bedrooms, number of stories and drill down by many house features such as porch, narrow lot plans, swimming pool and so much more.
What is the mark of a great house designs website?
The number of house plans
This is kind of important. I say “kinda” because it depends on the type of website you’re dealing with. Some are pure retailers in that they don’t create their own designs but merely sell house designs created by architectural firms.
Then there are the house plan sites owned by architects who design their own home floor plans and sell them exclusively. They may not have nearly as many options but they will sell designs that you can’t get anywhere else.
Moreover, if you like the architect’s style, it may be your best option. In other words, bigger isn’t always better.
Ability to execute detailed, filtered searches
This is huge and can separate a mediocre home plans site from an exceptional one.
You should be able to narrow down your searches by style (farmhouse, craftsman, modern, etc.), number of stories, small and tiny home search options, large houses and mansions (or search by square footage), narrow lots, number of bedrooms/bathrooms, affordable homes (as well as luxury homes and everything in between) and finally all kinds of distinctive features such as swimming pool, patio/deck, open concept,
House plans cost
You definitely want to compare these sites with respect to any current house plans sales and discounts going on. It’s a very competitive industry so there are often sales you can take advantage of and save 10% or more.
Customization
Some of the sites above offer custom home design services where you can tweak or customize the plans they sell. Or, they can refer you to an architect to handle it for you. You can save quite a bit of money working from an existing stock house plan yet get exactly what you want.
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