Stressing Over Your Next Home Renovation Project? Let AI Handle It.
A sea of apps is helping take the headache out of home design and construction. ‘There seems to be a new one every day.’
8 min
Halfway through the building process of Kyle Loucks’s new five-bedroom, 5,800-square-foot house in Vancouver, Wash., his wife decided she wanted to add a sports court.
At first he panicked. “One seemingly small decision, like ‘let’s put a hoop here,’ has a ripple effect,” says Loucks, 37, a former Meta engineer who founded a joint-rolling technology company called RollPros.
Using new AI software called Digs on his laptop, he put a box into the house plans, first in the backyard. Then, seeing that it wouldn’t fit well, he moved it to the driveway. Within minutes, his contractor, notified by Digs of the change, confirmed that the dimensions would work and messaged the concrete guys to let them know before they did the pour and to see if they had any input on holes for a pickleball net. The landscape designer weighed in, suggesting a couple of trees nearby to help it blend in, and the lighting subcontractor advised them on how a flood light would affect the high-voltage plan.
“It helped bypass the possibility of human error and miscommunication,” says Loucks, whose home is slated to cost around $2.2 million and to be finished in October.
Homeowners are experimenting with an explosion of new artificial intelligence applications to quickly visualise an array of layout and style ideas, coordinate with builders and designers and estimate costs. These new tools say they can help save time and money in the building and renovation process, which has traditionally been filled with seemingly endless decisions and an avalanche of paperwork that often result in longer projects and ballooning costs.
There are now dozens of AI apps related to home construction, design and renovation—most of which have sprung up in the past two years.
“There seems to be a new one every day,” says Patrick O’Toole , publisher of Qualified Remodeler, which did a survey in March 2023 of its 83,000 readers and found that about half have tried generative AI tools.
Some apps, like Renovate AI, focus on visualisation. Users can generate images to see how different design ideas might look by uploading photos or drawings of their rooms. Then they can choose styles like “rustic farmhouse” or tell the tool to adjust specific elements like paint colors, lighting, furniture or the style of the cabinets.
Other platforms, like Digs, use AI to create 3-D “dollhouse” floor plans and manage the logistics of a project, room by room. Digs can layer in the location of specs like the load-bearing beams, plumbing lines and lighting plans to show where walls can be knocked down, and users can query it to get the make and model of an appliance or the dimensions of the wall, all sourced from the original documents.
Analysts say the demand for new tools is driven in part by the state of the housing market. The decline in construction of new houses, combined with a rapid run-up in interest rates over the past two years that sent mortgage rates soaring, has resulted in many people choosing to stay and fix or add on to homes they already own. Spending on DIY projects soared 44% from 2019 to 2021, the latest stats available, according to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.
The new apps offer homeowners a way of gaining control over what can be a dizzyingly complicated and opaque process, though not without their own risks.
Jess Sandlin, 38, is working with an architect and designer to renovate a 9,000-square-foot home she and her boyfriend bought in Austin, Texas, for $2.5 million. But she is also using an app called Remodel AI as well as ChatGPT to help her get a sense of the possibilities and to empower her with images she can show since her vocabulary doesn’t include technical architectural terms.
“I wanted to get a sense of my own style and be a little more knowledgeable so I didn’t just get their style,” says Sandlin, executive director of Word Playground, a nonprofit for teaching children literacy.
As she tested out different prompts to home in on her own design sensibilities, Remodel AI generated hundreds of options—including some with furniture on the ceiling and the walls. She wanted an indoor play area for her four sons, aged 5 through 13, to include multiple layers of hammocks, a zip line and netting. The app couldn’t handle it. “It had no idea what I was talking about. It could not compute,” she says.
Dirk Morris, founder and CEO Reimage AI, the maker of the Remodel AI app, which costs $10 a month or $50 a year, says Sandlin may have been using the wrong tool: Sometimes people try to use the standard interior remodel tool to make extensive structural changes, he says.
Even when Sandlin was able to generate exactly what she wanted, she ran into human roadblocks. When she showed her architect AI-generated photos of a bronze fireplace with a brass mantle, “they rolled their eyes at me,” she says. Eventually, her designer agreed to the bronze.
While traditionally AI tools were aimed at professionals, the newer apps are letting laypeople in on the game, says Michael Anschel , a principal at Minneapolis-based OA Design and Build Architecture.
However, he says the tools aren’t sharp enough yet. For example, when Anschel asked Renovate AI to generate a kitchen with hand-scraped stone counters and paisley wallpaper, he got an image with stainless steel counters and paisley wallpaper on the cabinets and the ceiling.
Other pros have expressed concern about having to address design ideas that might not be possible from clients armed with AI-generated images. “It could be extremely annoying,” says Daniel Kaven of Portland, Ore.-based William Kaven Architecture.
Laura Bindloss, 38, who owns a social media and public relations agency, has renovated several homes, but she had never used AI to help until her most recent project: a 2,000-square-foot house she bought in March for $575,000 in Bellport, N.Y. Bindloss, who plans to live in the house on weekends as well as rent it out, was looking to spend a total of around $200,000, with $55,000 on the kitchen alone. She wanted to get the project done quickly so she could start renting it out this summer.
“I’d heard about it as a visualisation tool but it didn’t seem that useful,” she says. When she hired cabinetmaker Isla Porter to design the kitchen, she found that the company was using AI provider Skipp, which can make a scan from a phone into detailed renovation plans, complete with renderings, materials lists and construction-ready documents. The first step was to take a 3-D scan of the space with her iPad. She then answered a 40-question survey, with questions like “where do most meals happen” and “what do you like most and least about your current kitchen.”
The AI used her scan and survey responses to generate hundreds of floor plan options within minutes. Isla Porter’s designers then manually edited them, significantly reducing the time it would have taken if the designers had to go through the survey results without the technology, says Sharon Dranko, Isla Porter’s founder. Bindloss then picked from the three options Isla Porter recommended, choosing materials and finishes in the program to see how everything would look. The design plans for the kitchen were finalized in two weeks, says Bindloss.
Dranko says that even though the AI’s measurements tend to be 98% accurate, it’s still crucial to have a human designer double check everything. AI is also off sometimes when it comes to understanding living patterns, meaning how the way a person uses their kitchen should impact the design, she says. Dranko says she is constantly feeding it new information like colors and fabrics to make it more useful when it comes to finding the right style and look for her clients.
The idea of using AI in his home renovations came to Kade Boverhof when he was looking at possible floor plans for the renovation of a 1,900-square-foot house he bought in Grand Rapids, Mich., for $150,000.
Boverhof, 31, wanted to create a floor plan for the house that took into account all the iterations he’d devised in previous renovation projects using a computer-aided design (CAD) software program. There must be an AI program that could do this, he thought.
After searching Google and going on Reddit to ask others what they were using, Boverhof came across an app in development called A-Space, which let him use its tools for free as an early adopter in exchange for his feedback. He downloaded his existing blueprints, which included information on the location of walls that were necessary to hold up the structure, added some instructions and hit generate. From the four options, Boverhof locked in the kitchen location he liked best and again pushed the generate button to see the options for the other rooms around that decision.
Boverhof says the results weren’t perfect. It didn’t know the local building codes for the city of Grand Rapids, such as the percentage of space required to be windows or doors. But he says he saved many hours and got back new layout ideas that he could tailor.
“It’s at a primitive stage, but the possibilities are there,” he says.
Ryan Fink, CEO and co-founder of Digs, says that of the some 6,000 homes currently on its platform, half have homeowners participating. Builders currently pay $69 per user per month, but the contractors, vendors and homeowners involved in the projects participate for free, he says.
Sid Sarasvati founded Renovate AI because of the difficulties he encountered with staging homes for sale. He says the app will continue to improve, such as offering users the option to click on products to buy online, create budgets and connect with vendors. Launched in January 2023, it has some 15,000 subscribers now, 40% of whom are on a $10-a-week plan and 60% of whom are on a $40 annual plan.
Many of the AI apps are aimed at improving the speed and communication for homeowners working with an architect or designer. But some, including A-Space, hope to democratise the process and reduce the need for architects by automating tasks like filling in planning applications.
“We want to give every person access to architectural expertise,” says Ziyad Mourad, CEO and co-founder of A-Space, which plans on offering the app free to homeowners for a single project and for $50 a month to architects for unlimited use.
WSJ Tests an AI Remodelling Tool
Rashad Fakhouri, an architect at London-based Pilbrow & Partners, who is currently using A-Space on the side but not for work projects, says he doesn’t foresee a time when AI will replace architects because of the need for the architect’s aesthetics and their ability to troubleshoot throughout the process.
“We will still be necessary,” he says.
In five years, AI tools for home remodelling and construction will become more integrated, says Jose Luis Blanco, senior partner at McKinsey who leads the firm’s engineering and construction work in North America. “We are in the early innings,” he says.
Mike Rowe, of “Dirty Jobs” TV fame and a spokesman for AI provider Digs, agrees that the continued expansion of AI will democratise the home-building process. “It will put a lot more power in the consumers’ hands,” he says.
Some homeowners say the tools are already offering a newfound leg up in managing their projects with the pros.
“AI doesn’t talk back,” says Austin homeowner Sandlin.
Copyright 2020, Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. LEARN MORE
From elevated skincare to handcrafted home pieces, this year’s most thoughtful gifts go beyond the expected.
A haven for hedge-fund titans and Hollywood grandees, Greenwich is one of the world’s most expensive residential enclaves, where eye-watering prices meet unapologetic grandeur.
At least for people who carry the APOE4 genetic variant, a juicy steak could keep the brain healthy.
3 min
Must even steak be politicised? The American Heart Association recently recommended eating more “plant-based” protein in a move to counter the Health and Human Services Department’s new guidelines calling for more red meat.
Few would argue that eating a Big Mac a day is good for you.
On the other hand, growing evidence, including a study last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association, suggests that eating more meat—particularly unprocessed red meat—can reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s in the quarter or so of people with a particular genetic predisposition.
The APOE4 gene variant is one of the biggest risk factors for Alzheimer’s.
You inherit one copy of the APOE gene from each parent. The most common variant is APOE3; the least is APOE2.
The latter carries a lower risk of Alzheimer’s, while the former is neutral. A quarter of people carry one copy of the APOE4 variant, and about 2% carry two.
APOE4 is more common among people with Northern European and African ancestry. In Europe the variant increases with latitude, and is present in as many as 27% of people in northern countries versus 4% in southern ones. God smiled on the Italians and Greeks.
For unknown reasons, the APOE4 variant increases the risk of Alzheimer’s far more for women than men.
Women’s risk multiplies roughly fourfold if they have one copy and tenfold if they have two. Men with a single copy show little if any higher risk, while those with two face four times the risk.
What makes APOE4 so pernicious? Scientists don’t know exactly, but the variant is also associated with higher cholesterol levels—even among thin people who eat healthily.
Scientists have found that cholesterol builds up in brain cells of APOE4 carriers, which can disrupt communications between neurons and generate amyloid plaque, an Alzheimer’s hallmark.
The Heart Association’s recommendation to eat less red meat may be sound advice for people with high cholesterol caused by indulgent diets.
But a diet high in red meat may be better for the brains of APOE4 carriers.
In the JAMA study, researchers at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute examined how diet, particularly meat consumption, affects dementia risk among seniors with the different APOE variants.
Higher consumption of meat, especially unprocessed red meat, was associated with significantly lower dementia risk for APOE4 carriers.
APOE4 carriers who consumed the most meat—the equivalent of 4.5 ounces a day—were no more likely to develop dementia than noncarriers. (
The study controlled for other variables that are known to affect Alzheimer’s risk including sex, age, physical activity, smoking, alcohol consumption and education.)
APOE4 carriers who ate the most unprocessed meat were at significantly lower risk of dying over the study’s 15-year period and had lower cholesterol than carriers who ate less. Go figure. Noncarriers, however, didn’tenjoy similar benefits from eating more red meat.
The study’s findings are consistent with two large U.K. studies.
One found that each additional 50 grams of red meat (equivalent to half a hamburger patty) that an APOE4 carrier consumed each day was associated with a 36% reduced risk of dementia.
The other found that older women who carried the APOE4 variant and consumed at least one serving a day of unprocessed red meat had a cognitive advantage over carriers who ate less than half a serving, and that this advantage was of roughly equal magnitude to the cognitive disadvantage observed among APOE4 carriers in general.
In all three studies, eating more red meat appeared to negate the increased genetic risk of APOE4.
Perhaps one reason men with the variant are at lower Alzheimer’s risk than women is that men eat more red meat.
These findings might cause chagrin to women who rag their husbands about ordering the rib-eye instead of the heart-healthy salmon.
But remember, the cognitive benefits of eating more red meat appear isolated to APOE4 carriers.
Nutrition is complicated, and categorical recommendations—other than perhaps to avoid nutritionally devoid foods—would best be avoided by governments and health bodies.
Readers can order an at-home test from any number of companies to screen for the APOE4 variant.
The Swedish researchers hypothesize that APOE4 carriers may be evolutionarily adapted to carnivorous diets, since the variant is believed to have emerged between one million and six million years ago during a “hypercarnivorous” period in human history.
The other two APOE variants originated more recently, during eras when humans ate more plants.
APOE4 carriers may absorb more nutrients from meat than plants, the researchers surmise. Vitamin B12—low levels have been associated with cognitive decline—isn’t naturally present in plant-based foods but is abundant in red meat.
Foods high in phytates (such as grains and beans) can interfere with absorption of zinc and iron (also high in red meat), which naturally declines with age. So maybe don’t chuck your steak yet.
A&K Sanctuary unveils Kitirua Plains Lodge, a sustainability-focused luxury property shaped by landscape, local craft and contemporary safari architecture.
Two coming 2027 models – the first of the “Neue Klasse” cars coming to the U.S. early next year – have been revealed.
