Beyond asking for information and advice, ChatGPT is being used for interior design to brainstorm layouts, define your style, and plan an entire room. And it is genuinely doing a terrific job at it. This guide will cover how to best use ChatGPT for interior design, examples of prompts for the best results, and provide a fair evaluation of where it falls short. 

Can ChatGPT really design a room? 

Yes, absolutely. It is great for suggesting style direction, proposing layouts, building a color palette, and even generating images of the result. ChatGPT, when used properly, can be a wonderful and patient brainstorming partner. 

Its limitations become more obvious when you are asking for genuine product recommendations. ChatGPT is great because it has trained on vast libraries of knowledge and is great at summarizing those chunks of information that would take us much longer to read and understand. However, that training data won’t have anything that is specific to your needs and your room. Knowing where it excels and where it falls short is the best way to take proper advantage of the tool. 

How to use ChatGPT for interior design, step by step 

1. Give ChatGPT the full picture of your room 

The best way to use ChatGPT is to give it as much context as possible. Before you even start, tell ChatGPT the specifics of your room: the dimensions, where the windows face, the light quality, wall and floor colors, etc. The more you tell it, the more specific the answers will be. 

2. Ask it to define a style direction 

Describe what you want and let it help you translate it into “design terms” for you. So say something like “cozy but not cluttered, warm woods, nothing beige” and ask it to name the style, suggest color palettes, and explain the logic. 

3. Have it propose layouts and palettes 

Ask for several layout options and the reasoning behind it. Then ask for color palettes, like what colors should the walls be, what colors should the furniture revolve around, and what colors should accents be.

4. Turn it into a shopping brief 

Now ask for a brief of what to look for: what specific items, the dimensions, and style notes. Ask something like “a list of the pieces I need with target dimensions and the specs to look for” so you can have a guide for when you’re actually shopping. 

5. Pressure test the plan 

Paste your plan back and ask ChatGPT to assess it in case you’ve missed any other details. It can serve as a great critic and can be great for a final pass. 

The best ChatGPT prompts for interior design

Copy and paste these (and fill in the brackets). 

Finding your personal style

Act as an interior designer. I want my space to feel [describe the vibe]. Suggest three style directions that fit, name each one, and describe the palette and key materials for each. 

Planning out your room 

My [room type] is [dimensions] with [light and window direction]. I’m keeping [existing pieces]. Suggest a layout and a full furniture plan, with target dimensions for each piece. 

Building the color palette 

Build me a cohesive color palette for a [style] [room type] with [existing fixed elements]. Give wall color, main furniture tones, and colors for accents. 

Building a shopping brief 

Based on this plan, give me a checklist of every piece I need to buy, with target dimensions, materials, and the specific attributes to look for when shopping. 

Critiquing your plan 

Here’s my design plan: [paste]. Act as a skeptical interior designer and tell me the biggest problems with it and how to fix them. 

Where ChatGPT falls short for interior design 

ChatGPT is fantastic for brainstorming ideas. But it is not so great for helping you shop. This is due to the technical infrastructure it was built on, rather than something you can fix simply with prompts. Because ChatGPT is trained on a limited set of data, its recommendations can be a little outdated. Ask it to recommend a couch that was trending on TikTok last week, it might not necessarily be able to pull the correct products simply because that knowledge hasn’t entered its training data yet. 

You may be wondering, but when I have asked ChatGPT, it has been able to pull from live product listings, what is the problem here? When it does pull products from the live web, just like Google Search, it shows you whatever was optimized to rank. Brands are advertised by savvy content marketers who know how to make their products appear in answer engines like ChatGPT. So when ChatGPT recommends an item that seems like a neutral suggestion to you, it is in fact pulling a recommendation that has already inherited bias. ChatGPT also started to serve ads earlier this year, just like Google and Pinterest, so what surfaces first is shaped by who paid for the placement. And worse, a chatbot only hands you a narrow slice of results. You never see the full scope of what’s actually out there. 

Despite asking ChatGPT for design recommendations based on dimensions, it can’t actually query products for those constraints. For example, if you ask for a cream boucle sectional that will fit against an 8-foot wall, it might not actually surface something that fits. This has to do with the fact that retailer’s product data itself is messy, and ChatGPT is only as good as the product data that is given to it. So if it isn’t super clear what the dimensions are on the retailer’s site, then ChatGPT has nothing to filter on, so it guesses. And you can’t see what it quietly left out. Now and then, it also hallucinates. Users often report seeing an invented product, retailer, or price. 

None of this makes ChatGPT bad. It just makes it mediocre. Home decor and furniture is a domain that punishes generality. Onton’s product search runs on Ontology 1, a neurosymbolic engine that makes over 3M+ real products with real attributes instead of repeating the most optimized content on the internet. If you want to understand why that beats everything else out there, we published research here. 

What to use for the parts ChatGPT can’t do 

For designing your room, Onton Imagine renders from a photo of your real space (all for free). Once you find a render that resonates, you can shop it directly from the image. Head over here for the full workflow on using AI for interior design with Imagine. 

To find home decor and furniture items, Onton’s search can interpret descriptions, an image, or both, and return products based on the attributes that you specify. Onton doesn’t run any ads or serve manipulated results. 

To shop from an inspiration photo, simply upload a Pinterest pin, a screenshot, or a hotel lobby photo and find the furniture from that photo with Onton. Onton’s object detection reads the toom and matches each piece to real products. 

To understand how to use Onton for the home decor and furniture shopping journey, here is the full AI furniture shopping workflow, from inspiration to checkout.