MILAN — The race for a powerful AI tool for interior design — one that goes beyond merely creating an image of a room — is heating up.

On Thursday, Havenly Brands, the Denver-based interior design platform founded in 2014, is set to unveil Havenly AI, its AI-powered design assistant with what it contends is “genuine design expertise.” The platform is available through the Havenly iOS app, a chat-based tool that creates hyper-personalized, instantly shoppable designs, “delivering professional-grade results,” founder Lee Mayer told WWD on Wednesday.

Mayer said Havenly AI is unlike any other AI tool for interior design, as it integrates Havenly’s marketplace of more than half a million products with human creativity, allowing users to transition seamlessly from AI to human expertise to refine AI generated concepts. The platform was also trained exclusively on Havenly’s proprietary database of millions of real-world designs.

“It understands the nuanced interplay of style and curation at a level no general AI can approach. The result isn’t random algorithmic mash-ups, but sophisticated, magazine-worthy designs that reflect intentional choices about texture, color theory, spatial flow and lifestyle,” the firm said.

Mayer started Havenly at just 30 years old inspired by the desire to spruce up her own home on a budget. The former private equity executive has since helped democratize interior design for a digital generation and has recently made strategic acquisitions to create a one-stop destination for home design and furniture. Among them are home furnishings companies Interior Define and The Inside and home decor brands St. Frank and The Citizenry. Last year it purchased New York-based furniture firm Burrow.

The AI launch marks the next chapter in Havenly’s ongoing mission to make great design accessible to everyone.

Across the interiors industry, professionals are still experimenting with AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude to help run their businesses more efficiently. Mayer explained that most AI models weren’t designed with interiors in mind. While these platforms can produce images, they don’t truly understand space, style, or how people live in their homes.

“We purposefully wanted to make the product free, easy and fun to use. Take a photo of a space in your home, and in just seconds you can chat with Havenly AI and explore personalized designs with photorealistic 3D visuals. Even better, you can refine those designs within the app and actually shop from those ideas, across multiple brands, all on Havenly [with exclusive discounts],” she said.

The market, however, is burgeoning with new players. In 2024, tennis champion and entrepreneur Venus Williams, along with tech start-up veterans Raffi Holzer and Edward Lando, launched Palazzo, an AI-powered interior design platform that produces instant room transformations and provides visual tools, among other services. Also in 2024, Presti, a Paris-based start-up, developed a tool that incorporates real product imagery into an AI-generated room.

“Havenly’s AI design is different. Our multiagent system combines general-purpose language models with proprietary design models, each specialized for different stages of the creative process. Our models are trained on millions of real, professionally designed rooms, so it knows what good design looks like and how to make it work in the real world,” she said.

Havenly said its design AI model and iPhone app were built in-house. “We’re using a lot of different technologies to make this possible. We’re excited to blend advances in AI and large language models with our underlying data layer to bring fun, and useful, tools like this to life for our community,” Mayer continued.