Five years ago, a client fell in love with a photorealistic rendering she found in a real estate brochure and asked Seattle-based designer Jessica Doering to provide renderings to help her visualize her living room design. There was just one problem. A high-quality rendering can cost upwards of $1,500, and most designers pass that fee on to their clients. This person ultimately chose not to pay the fee. “We could never get our clients to make that kind of investment,” Doering says. “You can use that $1,500 to do more impactful things.”
Renderings are, and continue to be, a hallmark of the luxury residential and commercial real estate experience. And many designers are finding ways to offer their products at more affordable prices, often by working with overseas vendors. However, these are still costs that many customers are forced to incur. AI has the potential to fundamentally change that dynamic, as image generation tools make it easier, faster, and cheaper for anyone to create renderings from the comfort of their own studio (or home office, or taxi). The possibilities are as endless as the prompts. Platforms like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Nano Banana are known to struggle with scale and accuracy, especially when it comes to patterns, textures, and 3D floorplans, but they’re getting more sophisticated every day. They’re also gaining popularity among designers, who increasingly employ these generative models during the design process to help clients imagine what their space would look like if they painted a large-scale mural on a dining room wall or placed bold repeating fabrics on a living room sofa, for example.
“This is a game changer for me,” says Doering, who has been experimenting with ChatGPT for the past few years. “No matter how much you explain to your client, things can get lost in translation. If you can provide visuals, it takes all the ambiguity out of the conversation.”
Christina Phillips, a designer based in Ridgewood, New Jersey, also uses ChatGPT and adds: “It’s an incredibly valuable tool for visualization. Previously, if a client wanted to know what a particular wallpaper would look like in a room, I would have to go to Pinterest or Instagram or the manufacturer’s website to see if there were any images to show them. Sometimes there wasn’t any there. If they were going to make this technology look better and more professional, I would use it for every room.”
Given the meteoric rise of generative imagery tools and their widespread adoption across the industry, what will happen to companies specializing in rendering as designers and clients create their own room sketches and AI-generated photos?
Jenna Gajdusek, a Charleston-based designer and founder of the consulting firm AI for Interior Designers, says technology hasn’t advanced enough for designers to use AI for technical drawings and floor plans. However, if you’re just communicating ideas to clients, this is fine. “for visual Parts that do not require precision in presentation, [renderers are] It’s already being phased out,” she explains. Traditionally, companies have paid thousands of dollars to get one or two concept images to sell to clients. Now we can do that in 90 seconds and present three views to the client on the fly. ”
Gaidusek developed his own AI design app, but he also relies on a multi-step process that feeds Nano Banana with mood boards, floor plans, images created in Canva overlaid with actual products, and prompts gleaned from client meetings and concept presentations. (Dorling also uses Canva-generated images to improve ChatGPT performance, highlighting the importance of very specific prompts to achieve better, more realistic results.)
Of course, human renderers are favored by perfectionists, people with lots of money, and people who hate technology, but there’s also a level of trust and ease of interaction for the designers who hire them, which amounts to a kind of implicit design language.
Hand-styled by Carré Designs with renderings of the library design by Elliott Interiors.Rendering by Carré Designs
“There’s only so much I know about how designers make decisions and how they can inform AI and image generators. Those kinds of nuances and details seem impossible,” Christie Carre Freeland says of the hand-drawn renderings she creates through her Boulder, Colorado, company, Carre Designs. “For example, we know that Designer A always prefers 8-inch grout lines, while Designer B likes to play around with the size of the grout lines depending on the project. We want too much precision, and our clients pay us for that. They come to us to be really accurate team members who communicate things clearly to other stakeholders, rather than looking for the imagination that comes with it.”
There’s also a learning curve. Learning how to instruct AI tools to achieve the kinds of images that can potentially replace rendering takes time and effort. Additionally, some rendering companies have already implemented processes to incorporate AI into their workflows. “Many of our designer clients don’t have the time or energy. [to] “If they call us and know we’ve already done that work for them, you can’t tell how much more motivated they will be to learn it,” says Cale Freeland.
Gaidusek and many renderers themselves are hopeful that AI will ultimately benefit the rendering business in the long run. Improvements in workflow and project management not only shorten render times and reduce the level of administrative effort involved in creating images, she says, but also potentially allow agencies, at least those that are adapting to new industry standards, to take on more clients (at lower rates). “They may lose lower entry-level positions as they start using technology in their workflows, but they already know what they’re doing,” she added. “They can reinvent themselves in a different way.”
Even as this model becomes more prevalent and more rendering companies begin to offer AI-powered services at lower prices, and even as designers begin to incorporate AI-generated renderings more fully into their processes, human editors with actual design expertise will still be important.
“Designers who have been doing this in the real world for a long time are the ones who notice right away when something is wrong,” Gajdusek says. “I’ve been posting these kinds of posts on my Instagram since 2023, and it was really weird back then. The people who comment and take out really weird things that no one sees, that’s the designers. They’re the ones who have a critical eye because they’re trained. People who come in as DIYers or don’t have formal training can’t see those things. But that’s why you hire designers in the first place. Location.”
On the other hand, this may also be the reason why designers hire renderers in the first place. “I think there’s always going to be a need for a human touch in the high-end market,” says Mickey Mayo of Mayo Studio, a New York-based video production company. “There is a very clever balance where AI and other tools can be implemented to increase efficiency. But it takes a trained eye and an expert touch to really bring a distinctive brand, a distinctive product, and a distinctive design to life and resonate.”
There’s no denying that images written by human hands can be more credibly defended as works of art than images created with tools like ChatGPT or Nano Banana. For that reason alone, there will always be a market for them, especially for those with larger budgets. “I think the value of hand-drawn sketches and artistry is this luxury in a world of AI that is becoming oversimplified and dehumanizing,” Gajdusek predicts. “Having an artist or someone who can sketch will be very expensive in the future.”
Additional reporting by Aidan Taylor
