While picking out items for your home in Animal Crossing: New Horizons ACNH Items might seem serene on the surface, bubbling underneath is a prescriptive force - the Happy Home Academy (HHA) - ready and waiting to judge your efforts and dish out points based on style, placement, and Feng Shui.

Happily for us though, acing these tests doesn’t just net the satisfaction of a job well done - but rewards as well. There are B, A, and S ranks to gather, which get more difficult to obtain as you continue to upgrade your house - while you can collect bronze, silver and gold tiers of HHA rewards.

While there’s a lot of nerdy minutiae you can dig into if you want to max out your score, we’ll try and keep everything as clear and actionable as possible. If you stick to a few simple tenets, getting enough points for an S rank isn’t actually that difficult.

With that said though, the HHA Gold Trophy can be quite elusive, and you’ll probably need a fully upgraded house before you can stuff your abode with enough decorations to acquire it.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons Happy Home Academy guide - the basics.

Before we get into the real nitty gritty of maxing out your HHA rank, here’s a simple checklist if you’re just trying to stick to best practices and hit a regular S rank.

These general rules will keep your score high and the Home Academy inspectors happy. Many have them have been in previous Animal Crossing games, as well as New Horizons:

Don’t be afraid to use a lot of furniture items - you get points for each one. But don’t feel like you need to fill every single tile.

Use furniture pieces from the same set to get set bonuses - eg. Wooden-block table and chair -if you can fit all of the items from one set in the same room, then that’s extra good.

Try to stick to items that are the same color within one room.

Designate side rooms for a specific purpose, like a kitchen or bathroom, to match similar items like sinks and toilets
Decorate the walls and floor with rugs and wallpaper from Saharah.

HHA Rewards seem to give you a lot of points if you hang them up/put them on a table.

Use seasonal items - like Bunny Day furniture - for easy sets.

Don’t leave furniture items with an obvious front - like a sofa - facing the wall.

Don’t let trash items like old tires, boots, and tin cans litter your floor.

Don’t leave your house unattended for more than a month, or you’ll get cockroaches!

Animal Crossing: New Horizons pair of Nook Inc. branded Switch Lites announced for Nintendo's holiday lineup image
Animal Crossing: New Horizons pair of Nook Inc. branded Switch Lites announced for Nintendo's holiday lineup

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Most of those ideas are easy to follow without knowing the exact science behind their working. To get a good HHA S Rank, you just need to have a well put together house that tries to keep its theme consistent, without having too few pieces of furniture.

Keeping all of this in mind when you design your house will probably land you at least an A rank, maybe even an S depending on the size of your house. The official Animal Crossing: New Horizons Buy Animal Crossing Items Companion Guide (linked) - which is a beautiful and helpful resource that you should definitely look into getting hold of - reports the thresholds for B, A, and S ranks for each size of house, as the following.