Using the Flip Kitchen Designer

No. The designer runs in your browser — there is nothing to install and no plugin. When it opens you choose how to come in: sign in free with Google, Apple or an email code, or press Try it as a guest → and start drawing with no account at all. A guest gets the designer itself — walls, cabinets, 3D and AI Design’s three free runs a day — and can keep up to two designs for seven days after the last visit; a free account keeps up to ten for good, on every device, and a membership raises that to a hundred.

Two ways in, and both end up in the same editable plan. Pick a shape on the start page — Single Wall, L, U, G or Single Wall + Island — and type your wall lengths and ceiling height. Or draw your own walls with 🧱 Add Wall, typing each length and pressing Enter. Members, designers and our sales team have a third way: Import in Load opens a .kit file from 2020 Design, or a design exported from Flip Kitchen as .json.

Create walls · 1:36

No — a template is a head start, not a commitment. Once you are in, select any wall and retype its length, or right-click it for the full property sheet: height, thickness, which side the design runs on, whether it carries a bulkhead. You can add and delete walls freely, and a room that is not a rectangle is fine — the wall tool has 45° and 90° turn buttons, an angle box in degrees, and free-angle drawing while you hold Shift.

Yes, and it asks before it guesses. 🤖 AI Design starts by asking which walls get cabinets. If the plan has no sink, stove or fridge on it yet, it asks about each one — Has one keeps a plain cabinet in its spot so the layout leaves room, None designs without it — and none of it is compulsory. It then generates up to four complete layouts to compare. Pinning where the pantry or island goes, or setting the wall-cabinet height, is optional, under Advanced setup. It lays out the cabinets and the top moulding and leaves the countertops to you — see the countertop question below. AI Suggestion is the smaller version, on the 3D toolbar with Edit 3D on: you pick the walls in 3D (a dashed outline shows the rough layout), then it suggests the next single cabinet, tells you which wall and how far along, and explains why — the base cabinets first, then the uppers. AI Suggestion is free; AI Design is free three times a day for everyone, guests included, and after that each run uses GH Coins — a guest signs in first, and a membership runs it as often as you like.

You can. 🪄 Design Helper takes plain language, typed or spoken — “place BER36 here”. The trick is the anchor: hover the mouse over the spot in the 3D room first and the target pins itself, so you can take your time typing. F5 talks instead of typing. It lives inside Edit 3D, so switching it on switches Edit 3D on too.

The 🔍 search box on the canvas takes a plain word or a code — window, sink, B24, BER36 — and the results drag straight onto the plan. Faster still: with a cabinet already selected, press a bare arrow key to open Quick-add on that side, which also drops the cursor into the SKU box so you can type a code and hit Enter.

The designer is loaded with the real catalogue — true widths in 3″ steps, correct heights and depths, real corner cabinets and fillers — and it refuses to overlap what is already there. That is why it can tell you exactly what is left over on a wall and label a filler with the real gap it will fill. What it cannot do is check your tape measure: the plan is only as good as the wall lengths you typed in, so measure each wall at three heights and use the smallest. With the walls right, Design check on the 2D tool strip — the clipboard just before Quote — reads the plan and the elevations for the usual fit problems, such as an appliance opening that is too small, a run with no filler at a wall or in a corner, or a cabinet that runs into the ceiling or covers a window, and lists them with the must-fix ones first. It is a reference, not your local building code.

Two switches. In the plan, ⚡ Fast stops drawing the snap grid and the floor shadow (snapping itself keeps working); it is on unless you have turned it off. In the 3D room, the Quality button cycles 1 Smooth orbit · 2 Fast · 3 Standard · 4 HD. It starts on 1, the lightest; if it has been clicked higher, click it back to 1 or 2 — HD wants a decent graphics card — and right-click it to lock the level. Collapsing the right sidebar with the chevron on its inside edge also buys you a bigger canvas.

Yes — ▭ Countertop opens the countertop page. In Sketch, click the cabinet corners to trace each top, or use DIY · no 3D for an outline with no cabinets under it (right-click a DIY piece → Make countertop (3D) when you want it built); pick a backsplash and press Generate 3D. Dimensions is the drawing: every slab measured to 1/16″, with seams, cut-outs and the area. Right-click an edge for its edge type and overhang; on a DIY piece, right-click to drop in a sink or cooktop cut-out and click its numbers to type exact dimensions. The drawing goes into the PDF export as its own sheet. AI Design does not draw countertops; to have them built for you, press Countertop + Backsplash on the Flip Board’s Countertop page in 3D — it needs an account rather than a guest session, and a free account gets three a day, counted together with Auto add Top / Bottom Molding.

Draw countertops · 1:12

Either. Design Preference › Length unit switches the whole designer between inches and millimetres: every dimension shows, and is typed, in that unit. Everything is stored in inches, so switching converts on the spot without moving anything. The quote, the cut list and SKU names stay imperial, and the shape templates on the start page ask in inches. Inches you can type as decimals or fractions: 1.5, 11/16 and 1 11/16 all work.

The designer on this website is built for a computer: dragging cabinets, sweeping a marquee selection and the right-click menus all assume a mouse or a trackpad. A laptop trackpad is fine (two fingers pan the plan, a pinch zooms, space + drag pans anywhere). It opens in any modern browser, so a phone or tablet is fine for showing someone the 3D, but on an iPad we do not recommend designing in the browser: the FlipKitchen iPad App is in App Store review and coming soon. Until it is out, plan on a laptop or a desktop.

Ctrl/⌘ + Z undoes and Ctrl/⌘ + Y redoes, or use ↺ and ↻ in the tool strip. One to be careful with: Ctrl/⌘ + Shift + R does not refresh the page here the way it does elsewhere in a browser — it wipes the design and reloads. Use the browser’s own reload button if that is what you meant.

Yes — 🗒 Add Note writes a note onto the plan or the elevation. One thing to know: while note mode is on, only notes can be moved, so if cabinets suddenly refuse to budge, that is why. Turn it off and the plan behaves normally again.

In Settings → ⌨ Shortcuts you can bind your own combination to around three dozen toolbar buttons: press Record, then the keys. A handful are reserved and cannot be reassigned — undo, redo, Esc, Delete, Backspace and O. Shortcuts are saved in that browser and take effect the next time you open the designer.

Kitchens are what it is built for, but vanities work: the catalog has a Vanity branch alongside base, wall and pantry cabinets, and the Flip Board has a Bathroom page of fixtures that drop onto the floor, the wall or the countertop. Wall-hung vanities carry their own mounting height.

That is the Flip Board in the right sidebar of the 3D view — a page each for Door Colors (including a custom paint colour on Shaker doors), Countertop, Floor (real flooring products, plank width, pattern and direction, or tile with its own grout), Wall, Hardware, Lighting and Molding. To recolour a single cabinet rather than all of them, turn on the 🖌 Format Painter first and the next colour you pick becomes a brush. The Slab Gallery button is worth a look too: it walks you through a 3D showroom of real countertop slabs, and anything you shortlist there shows up in the countertop swatches back in the design.

Slide two fingers on the trackpad and the plan moves with them, sideways as well as up and down; pinch to zoom. The gesture nobody forgets afterwards is space bar + drag — hold the space bar, drag anywhere on the plan, and it pans like the hand tool in a photo editor. That one works with a mouse, a trackpad, a trackball or a pen. A middle-button drag still pans if you do have a wheel mouse. All three gestures work the same way in the elevation and on the countertop drawing — one set to learn, not three. A wheel mouse keeps zooming on a plain scroll, exactly as before — the designer tells the two devices apart. If it ever guesses wrong, set it by hand in ⚙ 2D Settings → Plan View → Pan & Zoom Input: Auto, Mouse or Trackpad.