Online Shopping Tools Make DIY Interior Design Magical
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Online Shopping Tools Make DIY Interior Design Magical

Digital tools let you customise a product or ‘drop’ it into a photo of your room.

By MICHELLE SLATALLA
Thu, Sep 23, 2021 11:14amGrey Clock 4 min

I AM A RUG addict. The way some people like to test-drive cars, I like to roll out antique Tabrīz carpets to see how their colours and patterns might completely transform the living room…or the family room…or even the kitchen.

This once seemed like a harmless hobby, when we had lots of empty floors and very little furniture. But now it’s attracting unfavourable notice.

“You have a very big rug problem,” said my best friend, Stephanie, an interior designer who absolutely refuses to look at rugs with me, the other day. “You have to stop working poor Richard to death.”

Richard runs the rug store in town, and this past week he delivered two 50-pound rugs. I wanted to try them in the dining room.

Lucky for him, he only had to drop them in the corner of the room. Then my husband had to move the furniture so I could try out these rugs. Which I didn’t want in the end. Because there are so many rugs to try.

Stephanie, who happened to stop by after the rugs were rolled back up and waiting for Richard to retrieve them, observed, “People are not going to put up with this much longer.”

Maybe they won’t have to. I recently discovered a miracle cure for my problem: room previewer tools on retailers’ websites, which let you see exactly how a rug—or sofa or bed—will look in your house without having to move furniture around.

These digital tools are becoming popular on retail websites. Some use augmented reality, some use 3-D rendering technologies and others just seem to be magic.

My favourite kind of tool allows me to upload a photo of my room. Then the tool inserts the rug (or furniture) I’m pondering into the image, perfectly scaled to fit my space.

After I spent the better part of an afternoon trying this out at Rugs Direct, CB2 and A-Street Prints (which sells wallpaper), I had an epiphany: Finally, the internet works!

The days of software that made you wait for minutes for a crude rendering to appear (or crashed your computer before the task was completed) are over. Processing power has gotten so fast, even on our phones, that we have the bandwidth to move photos across the internet in seconds, while a software tool does super-complicated math simultaneously and inserts a product from a retailer’s image library into that image and makes the mash-up appear on-screen.

Or something like that. For technical details, I phoned Pawel Rajszel, CEO of Leap Tools, creator of the Roomvo tool on the Rugs Direct site.

“I’m looking at a photo online of my dining room with a very attractive rug under the table. I’m wondering how this is possible,” I said.

“I can’t tell you our secrets, but I can tell you we developed a proprietary technology that tries to adjust for all kinds of factors,” said Mr. Rajszel, who has been refining his room previewer tool since its launch in 2017. “You might notice there’s a shadow on the rug from the light coming into the room,” he said.

“That’s eerie,” I said. What’s next? Visualizing wine spills?

Ben Houston, chief technology officer of Threekit, a Chicago company with a room previewer tool called Virtual Photographer, tells me that in the future, tools may allow a designer and shopper to simultaneously manipulate an uploaded image and add or move multiple pieces of furniture in the photo. “Someone from the store will be able to join you ‘in’ your room and give you shopping advice, like get a bigger rug and move the couch over there.”

For a second, I imagined doing this with Stephanie. If she weren’t so mean.

Threekit’s tool is sort of the opposite of Roomvo’s. You use your phone to grab an image of the furniture you’re considering from a retailer’s website. Then you can place the furniture in any room simply by looking through your viewfinder.

Mr. Houston directed me to Crate & Barrel, which has embedded the Threekit tool on some product pages. I clicked on “View in Room” to see how a full-size Jenny Lind bed would look in my guest room.

“Wow, that’s crazy, it adjusted to the right size in the space,” I told him, “but to be honest, it’s sort of hovering in the air, like the flying bed in ‘Bedknobs and Broomsticks’.”

“We’re working on that,” he said.

Other tools called configurators allow online shoppers to customize products on-screen, changing colour combinations, patterns or shapes.

Retailers who sell high-end custom home furnishing products—like the Rug Company and L’Atelier Paris Haute Design (which sells luxury cooking ranges)—say the configurators have increased sales and cut down on returns.

At L’Atelier Paris, stoves come in 220 colours, and prices range from $13,000 to over $65,000 (“if you add a hood,” said Ricardo Moraes, the company’s CEO) and can be fit with warming drawers, extra burners and other features.

“The days of the professional designer doing everything for the customer are over—people want to configure luxury ranges the way you can go online and configure a car before you buy,” said Mr. Moraes.

At the Rug Company, a configurator let me create custom versions of rugs by Kelly Wearstler, Paul Smith and Diane von Furstenburg. I changed sizes, shapes, patterns and ground color using a palette of 120 colours—which raised a question.

“Computers are notoriously bad at accurately rendering colours. How do I know what my rug will really look like?” I asked James Seuss, the company’s chief executive officer.

“After you create the design, our design team will send you samples of the exact yarns that we will use to make it,” Mr. Seuss said.

I asked him if I could visualize the custom rug in my room. Not yet, he said. For now, there is no room previewer tool on the site.

“If you send our design team a photo, they will insert the rug into it,” he said.

That seemed so primitive—until I looked at my poor husband schlepping actual rugs to the trunk of the car to be returned to Richard.

Reprinted by permission of WSJ. Magazine. Copyright 2021 Dow Jones & Company. Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Original date of publication: September 21, 2021.



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Capri Coffer socks away $600 a month to help fund her travels. The Atlanta health-insurance account executive and her husband couldn’t justify a family vacation to the Dominican Republic this summer, though, given what she calls “astronomical” plane ticket prices of $800 each.

The price was too high for younger family members, even with Coffer defraying some of the costs.

Instead, the family of six will pile into a rented minivan come August and drive to Hilton Head Island, S.C., where Coffer booked a beach house for $650 a night. Her budget excluding food for the two-night trip is about $1,600, compared with the $6,000 price she was quoted for a three-night trip to Punta Cana.

“That way, everyone can still be together and we can still have that family time,” she says.

With hotel prices and airfares stubbornly high as the 2023 travel rush continues—and overall inflation squeezing household budgets—this summer is shaping up as the season of travel trade-offs for many of us.

Average daily hotel rates in the top 25 U.S. markets topped $180 year-to-date through April, increasing 9.9% from a year ago and 15.6% from 2019, according to hospitality-data firm STR.

Online travel sites report more steep increases for summer ticket prices, with Kayak pegging the increase at 35% based on traveler searches. (Perhaps there is no more solid evidence of higher ticket prices than airline executives’ repeated gushing about strong demand, which gives them pricing power.)

The high prices and economic concerns don’t mean we’ll all be bunking in hostels and flying Spirit Airlines with no luggage. Travellers who aren’t going all-out are compromising in a variety of ways to keep the summer vacation tradition alive, travel agents and analysts say.

“They’re still out there and traveling despite some pretty real economic headwinds,” says Mike Daher, Deloitte’s U.S. transportation, hospitality and services leader. “They’re just being more creative in how they spend their limited dollars.”

For some, that means a cheaper hotel. Hotels.com says global search interest in three-star hotels is up more than 20% globally. Booking app HotelTonight says nearly one in three bookings in the first quarter were for “basic” hotels, compared with 27% in the same period in 2019.

For other travellers, the trade-offs include a shorter trip, a different destination, passing on premium seat upgrades on full-service airlines or switching to no-frills airlines. Budget-airline executives have said on earnings calls that they see evidence of travellers trading down.

Deloitte’s 2023 summer travel survey, released Tuesday, found that average spending on “marquee” trips this year is expected to decline to $2,930 from $3,320 a year ago. Tighter budgets are a factor, he says.

Too much demand

Wendy Marley is no economics teacher, but says she’s spent a lot of time this year refreshing clients on the basics of supply and demand.

The AAA travel adviser, who works in the Boston area, says the lesson comes up every time a traveler with a set budget requests help planning a dreamy summer vacation in Europe.

“They’re just having complete sticker shock,” she says.

Marley has become a pro at Plan B destinations for this summer.

For one client celebrating a 25th wedding anniversary with a budget of $10,000 to $12,000 for a five-star June trip, she switched their attention from the pricey French Riviera or Amalfi Coast to a luxury resort on the Caribbean island of St. Barts.

To Yellowstone fans dismayed at ticket prices into Jackson, Wyo., and three-star lodges going for six-star prices, she recommends other national parks within driving distance of Massachusetts, including Acadia National Park in Maine.

For clients who love the all-inclusive nature of cruising but don’t want to shell out for plane tickets to Florida, she’s been booking cruises out of New York and New Jersey.

Not all of Marley’s clients are tweaking their plans this summer.

Michael McParland, a 78-year-old consultant in Needham, Mass., and his wife are treating their family to a luxury three-week Ireland getaway. They are flying business class on Aer Lingus and touring with Adventures by Disney. They initially booked the trip for 2020, so nothing was going to stand in the way this year.

McParland is most excited to take his teen grandsons up the mountain in Northern Ireland where his father tended sheep.

“We decided a number of years ago to give our grandsons memories,” he says. “Money is money. They don’t remember you for that.”

Fare first, then destination

Chima Enwere, a 28-year old piano teacher in Fayetteville, N.C., is also headed to the U.K., but not by design.

Enwere, who fell in love with Europe on trips the past few years, let airline ticket prices dictate his destination this summer to save money.

He was having a hard time finding reasonable flights out of Raleigh-Durham, N.C., so he asked for ideas in a Facebook travel group. One traveler found a round-trip flight on Delta to Scotland for $900 in late July with reasonable connections.

He was budgeting $1,500 for the entire trip—he stays in hostels to save money—but says he will have to spend more given the pricier-than-expected plane ticket.

“I saw that it was less than four digits and I just immediately booked it without even asking questions,” he says.

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