Opoplan - the world’s first automated virtual architect system

by Startacus Admin

Fancy designing your own home? Opoplan, an innovative Irish proptech startup, turns your design brief into a Custom House Plan uniquely suited to you

Architects have to have many different skills and a wide knowledge base. This, unsurprisingly, means that they aren’t cheap to hire, and if you have managed to put together the funds to build your dream home, you have probably also taken this into account; however, it’s an additional expense that some may wish to avoid. 

The solution, you may think, is to get out the graph paper and your trusty 2B pencil and sketch a masterpiece of architecture. The problem with this is that when you take your work to your builders they may slap your face with a glove and tell you to get an architect. So perhaps there is a middle-ground that will please everyone. Except architects.

Irish proptech startup Opoplan has developed a platform aimed at allowing people to build their dream homes and have the more technical architectural parts done automatically by the system. 

Opoplan’s architects have designed a number of houses for the user to choose from as a basis, which can then be tweaked and tailored to your tastes. The platform can automatically take into account things like optimal orientation to make the most of the sun, the best views from your proposed site, and entrance location so that you don’t have to do the calculations yourself. So that you can get a better idea of what your new home will really be like, Opoplan provides the ability to view the building in 3D, rotate it, slice it for a profile view, walk around it, blow it out into its constituent parts, and even allows you to take your phone or tablet to the site, and use augmented reality to walk around the house as it will be (just don’t try to go upstairs).

You pay a monthly subscription fee while you’re working on your design, with a fixed price for the finished plans that you don’t pay until everything is finalised and you need them to get started on building, at which point you’ll get the full architect design set, with detailed information for the builders.

Opoplan started by targeting the US market, where people are more likely to tear down an existing house and rebuild a new one than in other countries, where we are more likely to refurbish. In 2019, there were 490,000 homeowners building their own homes from scratch. However, with demand growing at home, Opoplan has developed homes specifically suited to the Irish landscape and planning laws, so now you can save some money in an already very expansive endeavour and have an even greater level of control over the design.

If you've got an innovative smart built environment startup or scaleup, it'd be worth checking out the RElab programme which is currently open for applications.

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• #building
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• #design
• #architecture
• #innovation

Published on: 11th June 2021