I Used AI Interior Designers to Reimagine My Boring Basement

I spent most of the first year and a half in my house living with several empty rooms and stark white walls. The previous owner had flipped the house, trading the water-damaged wall-to-wall carpet, wood paneling, and peeling floral wallpaper with marble countertops, fresh white walls, and a mix of both rustic and modern fixtures chosen by a contractor whose mood board surely included the words "trendy," "cheap," and "aesthetically inconsistent." None of it was in line with my taste. Terrified of making a bad design choice that I’d have to live with for years, I knew I needed help.

I enlisted a local designer who understood my personal aesthetic immediately—on our first meeting, she had me thumb through a colorful stack of wallpaper to understand what I liked and so she could suggest designs that were in line with my style. After that, the process was easy. I went with the first wallpaper she suggested for our dining room, an orange tree design as an homage to my husband’s Florida upbringing.

My real-life designer got it. Artificial intelligence-driven interior design services come with the assurance that their platform will also get it, too, not via intuition, but through the power of emerging and constantly evolving technologies. Whether or not they’re actually effective is up for debate, and it depends on your needs. Sci-fi fears about AI’s impending takeover of humanity aside, many of the services maintain that they’re not trying to displace human designers—they want to provide tools for them, too.

"The real competition in the future design field will not be between AI and humans," says CollovGPT representative Markk Tong. "It will be between designers who can effectively utilize AI tools and those who solely rely on traditional design processes. AI design tools like CollovGPT will undoubtedly become an important driving force in this process."

The field is already crowded. Sites like RoomGPT, Interior AI, HomeDesigns AI, Midjourney, and DALL-E are image-generation services, mostly useful for inspiration and planning purposes. Others, like Planner5D, Homestyler, and HomeByMe  enable floor plan creation and can be useful tools, especially for someone planning a DIY update. Meanwhile, DecorMatters is a gamified image-sharing community that’s like Tumblr for design enthusiasts.

Established companies in the home design space like Houzz, Havenly, Ikea, and SpaceJoy also tout AI as helping drive their design visualization services. But for newer players like ReImagine Home, RoomGPT, RemodeledAI, and CollovGPT, AI is core to the service, not just a trendy buzzword.

Many AI designers rolled out within the last year, and according to RoomGPT founder Hassan El Maghari, the earliest versions were all over the place; they often failed to maintain the actual parameters of the room, prone to moving elements like windows, walls, and ceilings around and changing the room’s structural integrity. El Maghari told Business of Home recently that the platforms have recently improved, thanks to the introduction of a new protocol called ControlNet, which allows more control of Stable Diffusion, the AI-image generating engine many sites run on.

Each service will continue to get better at design—or at least that’s the promise of AI. And Tong says that CollovGPT’s mission is to "lower the barrier to entry for interior design while increasing design efficiency." In other words, professional grade designs for everyone, and fast. It’s an admirable idea. But are AI designers actually useful for someone who still has several rooms in their house in need of a facelift? The answer varies.

To properly test these services and see what they’re capable of, I presented a design challenge: My unfinished basement, which currently contains a washer and dryer, a pile of toys to occupy my children while I’m doing laundry, and little else.

Testing the waters of AI as personal shopper 

Before I got to the task of redesigning my basement with the help of AI, I wanted to explore the various services that offer something closer to full service—interior design room generators that are also shoppable. CollovGPT, Fullhaus’s Ludwig AI, and ToTree are more ambitious than your standard room generator, offering  mock-ups with actual links to, say, the counter stools for your kitchen island or the oushak rug destined for your living room. Some even offer the help of human design assistants.

CollovGPT offers packages for $159 - $259 that include a 3D mockup, a shopping list, and calls with a real-live design consultant. Pricing varies based on how many revisions you get on your design and how much you’re able to communicate with the actual designer. It also has a chatbot, a la ChatGPT, that’s in beta and will follow instructions, like "change this fixture", or "add subway tile to the backsplash."

If CollovGPT is making interior design more accessible for individuals, Fulhaus is doing the same for businesses. The company itself has existed for around eight years, providing furnishings for hotels and rental properties. Its AI design tool, Ludwig, is brand new, and when you upload a reference image, it will instantly generate actual buyable options for furniture that fit the particular vibe.

"Our tool isn't about creating a design direction," Fullhaus rep Justin Renard says. "It's about providing one and finding furniture that achieves that and then providing it in such a way that you can then edit as you go and manipulate."

So if you have a bunch of short-term rental properties in Clearwater, and you want a tropical look and feel, you could upload an image of flamingoes or palm trees and it will offer furniture options that scream Florida. It’s free to design a room using Ludwig, or $99 to design an entire single-family unit. Renard says he recently met a guy who owns 80 AirBnbs throughout the southwest that are "deeply themed," one with pineapples, and another with Marvel characters. It’s painstaking to furnish these properties, but Ludwig can offer recommendations based on reference images in a matter of seconds. 

 Then there’s ToTree, which, for $149, offers shoppable mockups and the help of a human design consultant. The company calls itself a "furniture shopping service" rather than an interior design service. Similar to many of the AI design offerings out there, ToTree pitches its efficiency, featuring testimonials on its site from users who are too busy with jobs or kids or life to put in time to furnish their home. After you answer a series of questions about your project and personal style, within 72 hours, ToTree will deliver two style boards with products from brands like BluDot, Room & Board, Article, and others.

AI interior designers won't replace people

There are a number of image generation sites advertised as interior design assistants. They work very similarly but vary on elements like site design and cost structure (most of them have a free element but you have to pay if you want unlimited renders or un-watermarked photos). Here’s a peek at a couple:

REimagine Home is a free service that will give you unlimited renderings of a room you want to revamp. Upload a photo and it generates designs in less than a minute. You can download a high res version (for a fee) or you can download a watermarked version for free. I probably won’t be making any design decisions based on what it rendered, because how would you design a room to look like it was literally designed by an AI (the only way I can really describe it) unless you were doing some sort of high-concept art installation?

REimagine Home wasn’t really sure what to make of the image I uploaded of the space, serving up unrealistic elements, like two bars with two sets of barstools with very different looks and something that looks like a pool table but may have not been a pool table. I tried multiple renders, adding different text inputs like "blue" and "bar" to see if the AI could improve, but each image felt a little off—one included a random piece of dark wood paneling in place of a piece of my kids’ playpen and another replaced the window necessary to keep the basement in line with fire fire code with a TV.

RoomGPT asks you to fill in a few prompts before you upload your photo, like what style you want and what type of room it is. You can then get four themes at a time for that single upload. The first three designs are free, but after that you have to pay. It’s $5 for 20 credits, and up to $79 for 750 credits.

These services are iterating rapidly, and when I first tried RoomGPT, the selections for room type were limited to basics like "kitchen," "living room," and curiously, "gaming room." It’s since added more selections, but basement was not an option, so I chose "gaming room" (close enough?) in a "professional" style (though I could have chosen modern, tropical, or neoclassical) and it generated a room that looked not unlike what you’d envision as a stereotypical room for gamers, with red neon lights and gaming chairs.

El Mghari says he plans to make the imagery shoppable eventually, and he plans to give users more control, allowing them to redesign rooms in specific color schemes or in different interior design styles (like traditional, transitional, or bohemian), or allowing them to add or remove specific pieces of furniture.

Rolled out last October, InteriorAI has a community feel. On the homepage, you’ll see recent renders the service generated that include the before image and the keywords submitted to help guide the design. It’s more customizable than the other such services from the beginning in that you can add more keywords for the style and aesthetic you’re going for and the type of room you’re designing.

What is it about AI image generators and basements? This one also lacks "basement" as an option for room type; When I selected "living room" in "midcentury modern" style, it served up the standard fare: clean lines, natural wood, and starburst fixtures in an open floor plan. It looked nothing like my basement, but that’s not a bad thing. InteriorAI’s front page urges you to "fire your interior designer." The render certainly looks nice, but an image alone does not justify firing her. You get five designs free, or it’s $29/month for unlimited renders.

Should you use AI for interior design?

CollovGPT’s Tong is correct to point out that AI-powered services make interior design more accessible; El Mghari says RoomGPT is meant to be a tool for designers, too.

"The way I've seen a lot of interior designers use my tool is to use them for initial client consultations," he says. "With RoomGPT, they can accept a larger number of clients by using the tool to quickly generate initial mockups for clients, then after clients sign a contract with them or have specific suggestions, the interior designers can then go and design their rooms as they usually would."

It can be expensive, finding the right designer takes time and effort, and the process itself is time consuming. I found my designer on Instagram after months of research, and even then, I had to wait about six months until she was even available to take my project on. The idea that you can fire up a website like REImagine Home and generate ideas for a project that may only exist in your head undoubtedly appeals to a wide audience. Sites like Collov that actually suggest actual furniture are even more appealing.

But I’m not going to fire my designer. I will finish my basement one day. I need a well-designed space where I can sequester my husband to yell about the Knicks. I envision vintage sports memorabilia, some big cozy couches, maybe a bar somewhere and a tasteful disco ball in the ceiling. Will an AI designer figure into this project? Maybe. First, they have to learn what a basement is.

Illustration by Ana Pérez López

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