Online Shopping Tools Make DIY Interior Design Magical

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.

When couples argue over money, the real source of the conflict usually isn’t on their bank statement.

Financial disagreements tend to be stand-ins for deeper issues in our relationships, researchers and couples counsellors said, since the way we use money is a reflection of our values, character and beliefs. Persistent fights over spending and saving often doom romantic partnerships: Even if you fix the money problem, the underlying issues remain.

To understand what the fights are really about, new research from social scientists at Carleton University in Ottawa began with a unique data set: more than 1,000 posts culled from a relationship forum on the social-media platform Reddit. Money was a major thread in the posts, which largely broke down into complaints about one-sided decision-making, uneven contributions, a lack of shared values and perceived unfairness or irresponsibility.

By analysing and categorising the candid messages, then interviewing hundreds of couples, the researchers said they have isolated some of the recurring patterns behind financial conflicts.

The research found that when partners disagree about mundane expenses, such as grocery bills and shop receipts, they tend to have better relationships. Fights about fair contributions to household finances and perceived financial irresponsibility are particularly detrimental, however.

While there is no cure-all to resolve the disputes, the antidote in many cases is to talk about money more, not less, said Johanna Peetz, a professor of psychology at Carleton who co-authored the study.

“You should discuss finances more in relationships, because then small things won’t escalate into bigger problems,” she said.

A partner might insist on taking a vacation the other can’t afford. Another married couple might want to separate their previously combined finances. Couples might also realize they no longer share values they originally brought to the relationship.

Recognise patterns

Differentiating between your own viewpoint on the money fight from that of your partner is no easy feat, said Thomas Faupl, a marriage and family psychotherapist in San Francisco. Where one person sees an easily solvable problem—overspending on groceries—the other might see an irrevocable rift in the relationship.

Faupl, who specialises in helping couples work through financial difficulties, said many partners succeed in finding common ground that can keep them connected amid heated discussions. Identifying recurring themes in the most frequent conflicts also helps.

“There is something very visceral about money, and for a lot of people, it has to do with security and power,” he said. “There’s permutations on the theme, and that could be around responsibility, it could be around control, it could be around power, it could be around fairness.”

Barbara Krenzer and John Stone first began their relationship more than three decades ago. Early on in their conversations, the Syracuse, N.Y.-based couple opened up about what they both felt to be most important in life: spending quality time with family and investing in lifelong memories.

“We didn’t buy into the big lifestyle,” Krenzer said. “Time is so important and we both valued that.”

For Krenzer and Stone, committing to that shared value meant making sacrifices. Krenzer, a physician, reduced her work hours while raising their three children. Stone trained as an attorney, but once Krenzer went back to full-time work, he looked for a job that let him spend the mornings with the children.

“Compromise: That’s a word they don’t say enough with marriage,” Krenzer said. “You have to get beyond the love and say, ‘Do I want to compromise for them and find that middle ground?’”

Money talks

Talking about numbers behind a behaviour can help bring a couple out of a fight and back to earth, Faupl said. One partner might rue the other’s tightfistedness, but a discussion of the numbers reveals the supposed tightwad is diligently saving money for the couple’s shared future.

“I get under the hood with people so we can get black-and-white numbers on the table,” he said. “Are these conversations accurate, or are they somehow emotionally based?”

Couples might follow tenets of good financial management and build wealth together, but conflict is bound to arise if one partner feels the other isn’t honouring that shared commitment, Faupl said.

“If your partner helps with your savings goals, then that feels instrumental to your own goals, and that is a powerful drive for feeling close to the partner and valuing that relationship,” he said.

A sense of mission

When it comes to sticking out the hard times, “sharing values is important, even more so than sharing personality traits,” Peetz said. In her own research, Peetz found that romantic partners who disagreed about shared values could one day split up as a result.

“That is the crux of the conflict often: They each have a different definition,” she said of themes such as fairness and responsibility.

And sometimes, it is worth it to really dig into the potentially difficult conversations around big money decisions. When things are working well, coming together to achieve these common goals—such as saving for your own retirement or preparing for your children’s financial future—will create intimacy, not money strife.

“That is a powerful drive for feeling close to the partner and valuing that relationship,” she said.

Online Shopping Tools Make DIY Interior Design Magical

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

New research tackles the source of financial conflict and what we can do about it

Recognise patterns

Money talks

A sense of mission