An interior designer's honest review of AIHom

I've been designing interiors for nine years and I'm naturally skeptical of "AI design" tools — most are toys. AIHom asked me to use it on real client work for a month and write what I actually thought. So here it is, warts and all.

The setup

I run a small residential practice. My usual stack is a modeling tool plus a separate render engine, and a typical concept pitch takes me a few days per direction. For this test I used AIHom on three live projects — a kitchen remodel, a full apartment refresh, and a quick staging job.

What genuinely impressed me

Speed on the early concept

The part that won me over was the front end of a project. I could take a client's brief, generate two or three layout directions with furnished 3D and renders, and walk into the meeting with options instead of a single sketch. That used to be most of a week. It's the difference between presenting and re-presenting.

Editing live in the room

In one review the client wanted the island moved and a warmer palette. I made the change on the spot and re-rendered while we talked. We left with a decision instead of an action item. That alone changes how a meeting feels.

It didn't replace my taste. It removed the hours between having an idea and showing it.

What frustrated me

I want to be fair, so the honest negatives:

• Vague briefs give vague rooms. If I was lazy with the prompt, I got a generic result. I had to learn to be specific — which, to be fair, is also true of briefing a junior.

• It's not my documentation tool. This is for concept and client buy-in. I still take the approved direction into my own software for technical drawings.

• I double-check scale. Most of the time it's right, but on a couple of renders I nudged proportions before sending to a client.

Where it fits

I'd put AIHom firmly in the early, client-facing part of my process: exploring directions, getting sign-off, and producing visuals fast. It's not trying to be a BIM tool, and I'm glad it isn't pretending to be. Used for what it's good at, it bought me back real hours.

Would I keep using it?Yes — for concepts, pitches and staging. For three of those projects it paid for itself in the first week, mostly in meetings that ended in a decision.

The verdict

Skeptic going in, quietly converted coming out — with caveats. It won't design for you, and it shouldn't. But if the slow part of your work is the distance between an idea and something a client can react to, this closes that gap more than anything else I've tried.

Related guides

• What is AIHom?

• Edit your design in 3D and render view