11/02/2026
A client said something to me a while back. “You know, I was going to design my entire house with AI.”
My inner voice: Good luck with that.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a huge AI fan and I use it every day. But some of the most beautiful rooms I’ve seen lately have one rather significant thing in common… they don’t exist. The fireplace is floating in front of a structural column. The sofa is about four inches deep. And there’s always an olive tree thriving in a room with no windows.
And I’ll say the part a lot of designers won’t. AI is absolutely going to put some of us out of business. The ones who refuse to touch it, or get offended when a client shows up with an AI image. And the ones without enough experience to push back when a client falls for a room that’s gorgeous and has no soul. Can AI generate a full room in seconds? Sure. So can I, with AI as my first pass. It gets me close to the look and feel, fast, and it helps a client see where we’re headed. But without field measurements and someone who understands the structure, it’s a pretty guess.
People using these images as inspiration is fantastic. Copy the styling and voila… you’ve got a room that looks designed. But have you noticed how many of them have the same candlesticks? The same plants? The same accessories? SO many. AI hasn’t gotten personal. Period. And it can’t.
Because the part no AI can do is notice things. Like the library in these photos. My client and I talked at length about creating something out of the box that still felt like a traditional library… just without the Benjamin Franklin green and the Turkish rug. Fairly late in construction, he decided he wanted a religious scene painted on the ceiling. But he’d just bought two antique globes from England at Sotheby’s, one terrestrial and one celestial, and he was so lit up about them. AI couldn’t have seen that. So I said, why don’t we paint a globe up there?
The only problem was that his ceiling was a triangle. Back to the architect I went, and we redesigned the ceiling and rerouted the ductwork for a 13½-foot dome. No small undertaking at that stage of construction, but we pulled it off. We painted North America from the terrestrial globe across the dome, and I added the family’s zodiac signs as a nod to the celestial one, so both of his globes ended up over that room.
And then the shelves. I curated a collection of authentic American books, the kind you can actually touch. Bindings you can feel, leather you can smell, worn pages. Objets I gathered from all over the globe, every one of them one of a kind. Butterflies under glass. Old photos of his family, generations back, tucked in among the books.
No rendering would ever have come up with that room, because no rendering knew about the globes.
I believe home is the most important place on earth. The four walls around you need to inspire, support and nurture you, so that the person who walks out your front door is the best version of you.
I wrote more about all of this (olive trees included). Link in the comments.
Have you tried designing a room with AI? I want to see what it gave you.
