Do you use AI? An interior designer's honest answer
- May 19
- 3 min read
Updated: May 21
letters from the studio, issue 01.
May 2026
AI adoption among interior designers tripled in 2025. From 9% to 29%, with another 20% planning to integrate soon. The tools are everywhere — Midjourney and Adobe Firefly for visualisation, Claude and ChatGPT for proposals and admin, Gemini for material and finish swaps, ArchSynth for sketches turned into renders. The industry hasn't just dipped a toe in. It's wading.
And honestly? The capabilities are genuinely impressive. In 2026, AI doesn't just generate pretty pictures — it helps designers visualise spaces before a single penny is spent, iterate through multiple directions in minutes, and present clients with photorealistic concepts that used to require a full 3D rendering studio.
I use AI throughout my studio — and I'm not shy about it. It gives me the confidence to be more creative. That 3am idea for a space, the unexpected palette, the material combination that shouldn't work but might. AI lets me test it before I commit, before I present it, before I've talked myself out of it.
Here's a recent project of mine, where the budget didn't stretch to a full styling shoot. I knew precisely how I wanted those shelves to look — the colour range, the shapes, the vintage finds, the little moments that make a shelf feel considered rather than decorated. AI let me complete my vision.
But here's what no AI can do. Yet.
AI is a remix engine. Designers are originators.
Every AI image is built from millions of existing images. It's good, sometimes brilliant at recombining what already exists. What it can't do is invent. It can't be inspired by the painting your grandmother had above her dining table, by the colour combination of the sea and plants on your holiday back in 2005, or by the way the light hit that specific tile in the kitchen of a house you stayed in once and never forgot.
The best designers are artists with a brief. We've spent years looking at art, architecture, textiles, films, fashion, and unfamiliar interiors. That visual memory — opinionated, personal, felt, is what becomes a scheme.
AI can render anything you can describe. A designer brings what you couldn't have thought to ask for.
You know that feeling when you walk into a room and something just isn't right? The furniture looks fine. The colours aren't offensive. And yet the room doesn't breathe. It doesn't settle.
It's the ceiling height pulling against the window proportions. The light source drawing your eye to the wrong corner. The scale that's nearly right but quietly off. AI doesn't know.. yet when something feels wrong in three dimensions, only when something looks wrong in two.
That feeling isn't a mystery. It's science.
AI gives you a starting point. A designer gives you a home.
Here's what I predict for the next few years.
The premium on craft will rise. As AI-generated imagery floods Instagram and Pinterest, anything handmade, sourced, or genuinely original will become more valuable.
Small studios will gain ground. AI levels the speed playing field. A one-person studio can now iterate at the pace of a team of ten.
Transparency becomes a brand value. Clients will start asking what's AI and what isn't — and pricing too. Honesty becomes the new differentiator.
Something that's been true from day one of my studio: every trade discount I access goes directly to my clients.
I'm not worried about AI replacing interior designers. I'm excited about what it lets me offer — faster thinking, more options, lower barriers to working with a designer in the first place.
A rendered image is not a home. A prompt is not a brief. A brief only exists once someone has listened carefully enough to hear what you couldn't quite say.
And no algorithm has ever walked into a room and felt it. Not the immediate, instinctive sense that something's wrong — or that everything is exactly right.
I'm curious to hear from you.
Designers — what am I not seeing? Homeowners — what would actually help you?
More from the studio soon.
Jess x
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