How AI is infiltrating interior design

Traditionally, Hayano explains, taking time to render (as in the amazing image above, created by the Egyptian-American designer Hassan Ragab) can be expensive, and is often unavailable to those renovating their own homes without a designer’s help. So while Home Visualizer might be just one tool in the arsenal of an interior designer, making rendering quicker and easier, it can also act as an off-the-shelf product for amateur designers who want to imagine their own remodels quickly and easily. When I uploaded a photo of the poky, slightly worse-for-wear shared bathroom of the ex-council flat I live in into Home Visualizer, for example, and asked the tool to reimagine it in a “Japandi” style, it took about 45 seconds to return a render of a calming new bathroom replete with wooden tops and a soft grey colour palette.

HomeVisualizer is one of many new tools – often, but not always, using GenAI – to supplement more traditional design practices. In many cases, these tools aren’t intended to replace a designer at all, but shave time and hassle off elements of the home renovation or buying process.

For example, one online tool called REimagineHome claims to offer virtual staging for estate agents, with the option to add or remove furniture from photos of houses, and to redesign landscaping around a building (House & Garden tried this one out, with mixed results – as with everything AI, many of these tools are both very new and totally unregulated, so quality can vary). Other design-adjacent tools span image editing software with AI-powered features (Canva, Playground.com) and room-specific platforms (LivK, for your kitchen. These tools feel playful to use; occasionally, it’s hard not to think of using them as something akin to gaming, perhaps designing an interiors scheme in a much more advanced version of The Sims.

Entrepreneur Jenna Gaidusek, who founded of AI for Interior Designers in October 2023, is one of the industry’s most prominent exponents for using AI. After graduating formally with a degree in interior design in 2010, Gaidusek became interested in virtual design while working for a furniture company, and in 2015 she set up her first business to pursue this new, digital design avenue full-time. In 2018, she founded a Facebook group called eDesign Tribe; the community would eventually gain some 5,000 members, and developed into an online school for designers called eDesign U, whose use cases increased almost exponentially during the Covid-19 pandemic, as designers scrambled to learn how to work with clients remotely and virtually. “It took off like wildfire,” recalls Gaidusek, “because everybody needed to transition.”