Threshold — Sensory-Safe Home Designer

Runs on a laptop or desktop — Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari. Not designed for phones.

Personal $39 · Practitioner $99 · Organisation $249 — the same file at every tier. A family uses it for one home. A firm uses it on every project they take. The price follows the use, not the features.

New in 2.0: homes with more than one floor, joined by stairs. Free-standing furniture you can move and turn. Free for everyone who already owns Threshold, and plans saved in earlier versions open unchanged. 

New in 2.1: more of your choices now show in the 3D model — curtains, a sheer layer, cove and night lighting, light switches, a window seat, a pause seat, a therapy ball, a trampoline and a plant. Options that are specification only, such as ventilation or insulation, now say so. Free for everyone who already owns Threshold.

Threshold is a design tool for planning a home around sensory needs — for a family designing around one person, for an agency specifying a placement, or for a firm briefing a build.

You place rooms on a grid, floor by floor, furnish them from a library of 122 options, and arrange the furniture where it actually works for the person using the room. You get back a plan, a 3D model and a specification brief you can hand to a builder or an OT.

Every option says where its claim comes from. Each carries an evidence tier — codified standard, practitioner consensus, or vendor preference — and preference items can never raise your design score. Where a figure is a convention rather than a standard, it says so.

It scores range and control, not calmness. A house where every room sits at the same low level has nowhere to go. Threshold scores the gradient across your plan, and whether the person in each room can change the conditions themselves.

It tells you what is wrong, and shows you where. Review checks your plan against code minimums and design rules — exits, hallway widths, escape routes, whether a retreat is actually reachable from the rooms people use, and, on a home with more than one floor, that every floor has a stair down and the exit door is on the lowest floor. Some warnings come with a button that fixes them in one reversible step. Where the answer is a judgement about where something goes, it shows you the room and leaves the decision with you, rather than rearranging your plan behind your back.

Nothing leaves your device. No account, no sign-in, no analytics, no server. Your plan and the people you list are held in your own browser and nowhere else. There is a Privacy panel in the app that counts every network request the page has attempted, live, so you can check that yourself rather than take my word for it. It reads zero.

What it will not do. It won't tell you a design will improve anyone's life. No post-occupancy study of a sensory-designed private home exists, and the tool says so on its opening screen rather than implying otherwise. Cost figures are an indicative planning band, never a quotation. It is a design and specification tool, not clinical, therapeutic or medical advice, and it does not replace assessment by a qualified professional.

One file. One payment. Yours to keep, works offline forever.

If the price is the thing standing between you and this, write to me. That is not a catch and there is no form.