Apparently I'm Dark and Moody
I am a very dark and moody boy, and I think mid-century modern is the coolest design period ever. That is, at least, according to Atelier, my AI interior design assistant. I've been redecorating my house for the last year, but I needed some help. I wanted a very specific experience I hadn't found: an interactive, collaborative design assistant that knows my taste, that doesn't cost me hundreds of dollars an hour.
I got started by discussing my idea with Claude in a long chat session. We went over everything, from the application's aesthetic to the backend and front-end frameworks I wanted to use. We dug into implementation details after the app's basic framework was solidified, and then I had it generate an initial Claude Code prompt to get the basic functionality up and running. I headed over to Claude Code with that, and we were off to the races.
The basic premise of Atelier is: "What if Pinterest and AI?" With Atelier, you curate images, much like Pinterest, that you find aesthetically pleasing. You can place images into boards. I even made a little thing that lets me upload images to Atelier directly from my phone without going through the app. This was half the fun. I found designers that I liked: people specializing in clean, well-edited interiors with a penchant for the dark and moody. I saved the vibes for the app, not for coding.
But what makes Atelier fun is its design mode. In design mode, you drop some pictures of a room you want to redecorate. Atelier uses those images and searches for similar images in your inspiration photos. Then the magic happens! It sends the images along with relevant inspiration photos to Claude Sonnet 4.6 (with vision) for analysis. This analysis identifies patterns in your inspiration image and provides feedback on the current layout: what works (my killer taste in paint that I owe to Atlanta interior designer Dana Lynch), and what doesn't (my oversized beige sectional). It even pulls in details from the images, like the art I love, and noted that I apparently have a fascination with geometric and abstract art from the 60s to 80s. After its analysis, it recommends several redesign approaches.
Once this introductory interaction is complete, you can have a conversation with the agent about those ideas. I love this Sputnik chandelier. I don't like this charcoal rug. Can we make it lighter? I like the dark and moody vibe of option two and the material palette of option three. It then integrates that conversation over time into a coherent design thesis and asks if you'd like to see a rendering of the chosen approach. Fun! It then generates a prompt for Gemini's Nano Banana to turn the idea into a tangible rendering of the design we landed on (a dark and moody living room with Farrow & Ball's Dyrehaven on the walls, MCM leather armchairs, and a sleek modern sofa in green velvet), which you can then iterate on conversationally. I had an absolute blast doing this across several rooms in the house.
After some push and pull with the agent about how much I love my heirloom credenza and don't want to replace it, I ended up with designs that felt very much like me. At this point in the conversation, Atelier asks if you would like to see a structured design plan. I think this is one of the app's killer features. When it lays out the plan, it provides a phased implementation approach and outlines various budget levels you can spend. In the most expensive version of my living room, for example, the agent installed a massive slab of quartzite from floor to ceiling on the narrow wall next to my fireplace. Stunning, but not the kind of thing I could commit to. But a fireplace surround in a dramatic Blue Roma? Absolutely. It even pointed out that I could probably find remnants at a slab yard instead of buying a full slab.
The excitement from these sessions with Atelier almost sent me on an uncontrolled spending spree. I can't tell you how much time I spent on Chairish and 1stdibs looking for the perfect leather lounge chairs or a vintage brass Goffredo Reggiani arc lamp. I am so ready to see this vision come to life, but, again, during conversations with the agent, I was encouraged to lean into the curated-over-time aesthetic I love so much and to search for exactly the right pieces rather than settling for the first thing that looked remotely like the renderings. So, I slowed down (against my instincts) and didn't buy everything I set eyes on right away. I mean, practically speaking, I can't afford to redecorate my entire house right now anyway.
Another realization I took from Atelier, as I curated my inspiration photos and interacted with the app, was that I want to work with someone to realize this vision. Half the fun was the conversations that I had in the process. But the designers I like charge by the hour, and going from a Pinterest board to a design plan can be costly. My color consultation alone was two hours, and designers are not cheap. So I see this experience as a jumpstart to the process: I know what I'm looking for now, and I can use my time wisely to refine the design plan and figure out how to source materials locally through a designer who knows the design scene in Atlanta infinitely better than I do. And I owe it all to $80 in Anthropic tokens.