Animal Crossing: New Horizons - Happy Home Paradise puts you in charge of designing a plethora of vacation homes for individual villagers. With the power to choose their house and even the season, we’ve got plenty of responsibilities when it comes to crafting their dream homes. With so much to think about, here are our essential tips for designing a room around the statement pieces that your vacationers love so much. Whether it’s weird and wacky or just somewhere ultra cosy for an Animal Crossing villager to relax, here’s our guide to making their Happy Home Paradise abode the best it can be.
1. Check the theme
Unless you’re building a room for a special character you’ve invited via an Amiibo, your new vacation home owners are always looking for a specific theme with key items. This means you’ve got a framework to go by, be it an ideal snowy paradise or somewhere to do DIY and craft. So unbox those red-wrapped items - remembering that some of them might be outside - and you’ll be able to understand the assignment and see the kind of style they’re looking for. The good news though is that because this is Animal Crossing, they’re never going to tell you that they don’t like the house. As long as their favourite items are in there, you could surround them with desk fans and they would be over the moon. But that’s not why you’re here. You want things to look good so it’s all about thinking about related items to enhance the necessary furniture and finding decor to match.
2. Look for orange dots
Thankfully, Happy Home Paradise makes finding matching decor a little easier by adding specific new items to the furniture selection that will look good with statement pieces. Keep an eye out for orange dots next to furniture items that indicate they're a recent addition to the library and you’ll see plenty of related items. This might be a ski wall for a snowy home or a piece of antique furniture for a grand library. Whatever it is, if there’s an orange dot on there, pop it in the room to take a look and see if it fits in with the style. And remember, this means wall decor, floors, lighting, and rugs too, so explore the furniture menu properly to find as many orange dots and new items as possible. This is also a great way of finding items that you didn’t know were available so you can hunt them down for your own house on your home island.
3. Keep customising furniture
Once you’ve placed your key items and some other themed furniture, it’s always important to remember that you can always customise the majority of the other items to fit with your theme. Tables come in all different colours of wood and if you’re looking for wall decor, most of the framed prints have different frames and content to make sure that everything matches. And you don’t always need to customise an item from the furniture menu. If you have an item placed and quickly want to see how it will look in different colours, highlight it and you can press X to switch between the different customisation options. Remember too that Happy Home Paradise adds a number of furniture sets from older Animal Crossing games so you’ll definitely always find a theme to suit even the oddest of vacationer requests.
4. Partitions and feature walls
Happy Home Paradise comes with a stack of new home design options that means you no longer have to use well-placed climbing walls and camera trickery to make it look like you’ve got a dividing wall. The addition of partitions mean you can really make a room look unique and add divided living or sleeping areas for vacation roommates. Add in some pillars and your creations can look Selling Sunset-levels of impressive. Always remember too that you can use feature walls to make your furniture pop or just when you can’t decide between two equally brilliant designs or colours. Spin the room with the wall you’d like to accent in front of you and then hit X and you’ll set a feature wall. Handily, partitions positioned against that wall will also change to that wallpaper or paint colour, you just can’t put any wall decor on them.
5. Play with lighting, sound and polish effects
And finally, bring your statement pieces to life by putting them, quite literally, in the best possible light. The lighting menu is a great place to completely change the atmosphere of a room with a range of colours. You can even change the intensity of the hue to create just the right mood. The soundscape menu is equally important. Here you can bring in the soothing sound of the ocean, a jungle or even the reassuring patter of rain to suit your vacationer’s dreams. Away from this menu too, it’s always worth checking which polish effects you have unlocked. Making furniture sparkle is only the beginning. You can bring furniture items to life with electricity or water effects and you can even design your own. The things we do for the needs of our vacationers… Lottie would be proud.