Imagining how you could extend your home – or a property you fancy buying – is a favourite British hobby.
We love the idea of transforming our homes so much that an entire cottage TV industry has sprung out of it, ranging from Grand Designs, to Ugly House to Lovely House and Your Home Made Perfect.
For Jaemi and Roly Glancy sketching how they could renovate their properties went one step further and turned into a start-up Peek Home, helping others to envisage what they could do with their home in a quicker and more cost effective way than enlisting an architect.
The end result for clients is a walk through video reminscent of a TV property-show style makeover.
Jaemi and Roly Glancy, the founders of Peek Home, which can turn floorplans into a cost effective design of what you can do with your home
On a This is Money Podcast bonus episode, Roly explains how the couple went from drawing up their own possible extension plans, to helping friends imagine what they could do with their homes, and eventually turning an evening sideline into a business.
Roly’s background in architectural work meant he was well-placed to take a floorplan and draw out what the couple could do with their own property.
He says: ‘We did this fairly intuitively, as it felt like the thing to do with the skills that I had. Then as our children came along and we needed to move to a bigger house, we did it again.
‘We were having lots of conversations with friends and they were talking about plans for the houses that they were in, or houses that they were buying, and so I told them what we could do.
‘I’d say, send us over the estate agency details and we’ll draw up the house quickly.
Peek Home can work from floorplans and cost effectively design what people can do to transform their homes
Peek Home shows before and after plans in 3D and offers a video walk through tour
Roly adds: ‘We’d invite ourselves round for a bottle of wine and dinner and bring the laptop with us, quickly draw up the house in 3D and help them imagine what they might be able to do.
‘Our friends found it valuable, and they started telling their friends and we started being really busy on evenings and weekends.
‘We thought we can’t really take on any more of this, we’re going to have to start charging money.’
At that point, the couple didn’t definitely have starting up Peek Home in their plans but when the Covid pandemic arrived they decided to get it off the ground.
Roly says: ‘Lockdown hit and that gave us the gift of time. We spun up a bit of a website, put it out to friends and family and the rest of it is history, it just snowballed from there.’
The plan is to let people imagine themselves in the space, says Roly Glancy, of Peek Home
Now Peek Home offers people the chance to get 3D sketch designs drawn up within days that show what they could do with their property, starting from £199 plus £50 per bedroom.
Customers can upload floorplans from estate agent details, or even from Rightmove, outline what they want to achieve, and Peek Home’s expert designers will draw up what they could do.
The result is a 3D model and walk through video that Roly says lets you ‘really imagine yourself in the space and get a really good sense of what the layout will be like and how it will work for you and your family’.
Roly says that this isn’t a substitute for all the work that an architect would do but it is a starting point at a much lower cost.
