Animal Crossing: Happy Home Paradise: How to design your Villagers’ homes

When trailers dropped for Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ Happy Home Paradise, one of the many many things they hinted at was the ability to design your villagers’ homes on your own island. There was a brief moment in which one of your villagers showed up in City Hall and talked to you and Tom Nook about you remodeling their home. I was hyped for this but I never found a way to do it. I did now though.

While Happy Home Paradise provides endless opportunities to flex your creative muscle, it does actually have an end game. As you play through the game and accomplish your various goals and build the many facilities like hospitals and cafés you eventually get to the end of the “story” in which you fully furnish the main island and decide to throw a celebration. DJ K.K. shows up and throws what’s honestly the best celebration I’ve ever seen in an Animal Crossing game.

Afterwards, things go a bit still in the Happy Home Paradise. No one really comes up with anything new and there are no more story points outside of the occasional greeting variation. But it still holds a big surprise, you just have to sleep on it.

The next day, when you get on to play your phone will ring. Tom Nook will say he heard about the celebration and has an idea about everyone’s homes.

It eventually leads to Tom Nook revealing his idea for a “home-design consulting” service on the home island. This allows you to actually design the homes for your various villagers. And being Tom Nook, it’ll cost you. Luckily, it’s only 9,000 bells up front which is a HUGE improvement over the 700,000+ bells he charges to add a bit of storage. And, he gives you miles when you’re done which is very appreciated since the game has suddenly gotten a LOT more hungry for them.

It works a little differently here in the fact that while you still have option to the massive amount of options you had available in Happy Home Paradise, you cannot change the size of the room and you can’t add additional rooms and floors. But it’s nice, especially for some of the early visitors to your island that just used simple furniture, to finally give them a fully furnished home.

The other thing that makes this a bit different is that in normal “your island” fashion, your changes don’t happen till the following day. You essentially visualize the changes you want to make in your head and then Tom Nook spends the day with the client seeing how they feel about the changes.

But it’s still awesome because some of the characters, admittedly, do not know how to decorate their homes for the life of them so it’s a very welcome ability to fix their hottest of messes.