Wayfair’s AI tool can redraw your living room and sell you furniture

Wayfair has launched a free “virtual room restyler” called Decorify. It employs generative AI to show you a redecorated version of the room you want to zhuzh after you upload a picture of it and choose the visual style you want. Then, if you like what you see, you can pick from a grid of furniture recommendations presented to the right of your AI-remodeled room.

Shrenik Sadalgi, R&D director at Wayfair, says, “Decorify creates a discovery experience that provides endless inspiration and powers the home personalization journey.”

Remember those augmented reality shopping app features that let you plop furniture down in your house using your smartphone’s camera? This ain’t that — Decorify won’t show you renders of actual, existing furniture within your actual room. Wayfair uses an AI model to create new imagery, so it’s going to show you weird reflections on curtains, plants sitting on day beds, and furniture that doesn’t quite make sense, and it might just decide your room is twice the size it actually is.

After you’ve uploaded your picture, a drop-down lets you pick from several styles, which can be something well-defined like “mid-century modern” or “farmhouse” or more vague, like “bohemian” or “perfectly pink.” Then you enter what type of room you’re decorating (right now, only living rooms are supported).

Alternatively, you can select single items in your room to have Wayfair’s model replace them with something in one of the styles from its drop-down menu. The site works on a computer or on your phone.

I asked Wayfair how it plans to improve the feature in the future, and Sadalgi said the company is planning to fine-tune its model, which he said is open-source, to add “proprietary branding data” so the designs it produces will have more “1:1 matches of Wayfair products.” He added that eventually, customers would be able to “start with a list of products first” and create a room with those furniture pieces in it.

As for product suggestions, Sadalgi said they are created by a computer vision model “trained on our extensive product catalog.”

Wayfair isn’t the only company using AI to help with house-decorating visualization. A site called HomeDesigns AI offers a similar feature — starting at $27 a month — as does VisualizeAI, which also costs money but offers more style options than Decorify and lets you enter items to include or exclude from the generated image. A quick Google search says there are countless other apps and services offering to do the same thing, many in exchange for your money.

Wayfair, on the other hand, isn’t charging customers to use Decorify, and as far as I can tell from tinkering with some of the other options online, it’s about as powerful a tool, if a little sparse on options at the moment.