Early on in Animal Crossing for Gamecube, Tom Nook asks you if you'd like to join the Happy Room Academy, better known as the HRA. The Happy Room Academy is a group that inspects your house on a nightly basis and then scores the interior design. Many have found it difficult to achieve high HRA scores because the HRA never informs you how they judge your house. Below is a guide to HRA scoring:

How you decorate your house is up to you but the Happy Room Academy will award you with points and prizes if you follow their rules. If you achieve 70,000 points you will get the house model, while 100,000 points will score you the manor model. If you change your layout you will receive a letter, on special wing paper, in your mailbox the next day.

To understand the HRA there are some basic definitions you need to know:

Series: A large group of matching traditional furniture, with accompanying wallpaper and carpet. A series includes such items as beds, lamps, and tables. An example of a series is the Classic Series. Series include the Necessities of Life.

Themes: A large or medium sized group of related items, with an accompanying wallpaper and carpet. Unlike series, themes consist of unconventional furniture. An example of a theme is the Boxing theme.

Sets: A small group of related items, sometimes containing as few as two or three pieces. Furniture sets do not have matching wallpaper or carpet.

Necessities of Life: Bed, table, chair, wardrobe, and dresser OR bureau

The HRA prefers to see a complete series or theme on your first floor. You will lose 4000 HRA points per non-matching item on your first floor. The basement of your house is never rated and can be used to store anything you want. Furniture from sets should be displayed on the second floor only. All items that have a function must be able to be used. For example, if you have a chair in a room, a player must be able to sit in it without moving it in order to receive full HRA points. Items with faces, such as dolls and gyroids, must never face the wall. To clarify--yes, items will always face *A* wall, but they must not be placed directly up against a wall and facing it. Players commonly place gyroids next to the entry way so the player can see their faces as he or she walks in. The wall there is invisible to the player, but the HRA can see it. Additionally, any items left on the floor that can be put away (such as raffle tickets), will lose you 1 point per item.

Common items, such as those that can be regularly purchased at Tom Nook's shop, do not generally bring in a lot of HRA points. Usually, rarer items, such as event-only items, are worth more HRA points. Certain rare items, including lucky items, are worth a lot of HRA points (the Arwing, for example).