This Italian Duo Wants to Furnish Your Room in Seconds

Furnishing an apartment usually means a browser full of open tabs, a tape measure, and some uncertainty about whether the sofa will fit the space it was meant for.The buying is spread across dozens of retailer sites, and the shopper often doesn’t know whether the pieces actually work together until they’re delivered.A free iOS app called elephantroom was built to reduce that uncertainty.

Co-founded by architect Lora Fahmy and AI engineer Alessandro Duico, who serves as chief technology officer, the app creates a full room layout in seconds using products from store catalogs, each sized to the centimeter.Shoppers can set their preferred style, budget, and brand by choosing from options generated by the assistant.

They can then send the entire plan to a shopping cart.The global furniture market is worth roughly $786 billion, yet much of the buying remains stubbornly analog and disjointed, closer to the pre-internet way of shopping than to booking a flight or ordering groceries.The result is a familiar stall.Shoppers hit a version of designer’s block: they simply can’t picture the finished room, and can’t be sure if a given piece works well in their space.

A wave of AI design apps promised a fix, generating photorealistic rooms from a single prompt.In practice, those renders can have limitations.

Furniture may be generated rather than based on purchasable products, and even when a real model is used, its dimensions may not be represented precisely enough to show how it could fit within a room.Duico believes this limitation is structural, built into the technology.“The problem is that it’s never going to be physically accurate, at least for the foreseeable future, because it doesn’t know the space the picture represents or the measurements of the furniture,” he says.

Most apps, he explains, lean on technology that paints furniture into a photo, reverse-engineering that final result to guess where each piece sits.The result looks convincing and mea...