Interior Design's Discovery Problem Has a £3,000 Gap in the Middle

01 /The Concept

Interior design has a discovery problem: most people can't design from a blank canvas, and professional help starts at $3,000 per room. Madespace built a third path.

You start by photographing a room or selecting a floor plan from the platform's catalog of common layouts.

From there, you can take a dated, unappealing room...

and transform it into something beautiful in a couple of clicks.

The generated design can then be refined to match your personal style – different color palette, different finishes, different furniture and decor styles.

The notable thing is that none of this requires writing prompts. Instead, you browse a catalog of designs created by professional designers, pick one you like, and adapt it to your taste. Or combine elements from several designs – specifying which pieces to take from each – and blend them into something that's distinctly yours.

The catalog was built by commissioning professional designers to create a wide variety of options across styles, moods, and room sizes.

The platform's real commercial hook: every item shown in a generated design is shoppable – you can browse and order it directly through Madespace. This means the design algorithm always works within the inventory actually available through the platform's marketplace.

At the purchasing stage, there's another useful feature: for any piece of furniture or decor, you can browse alternatives across a wide range of price points – so users can hit their renovation budget without sacrificing the overall look.

If users run into questions while designing, or want professional feedback on their choices, they can book a video call with one of the startup's in-house experts directly from the platform. For now, those experts are the founders themselves, who use these sessions to identify gaps in what the platform can currently answer on its own.

Madespace launched just last week, with the announcement posted on Product Hunt.

02 /Why It Matters

The founders spent years working in PR for tech companies before making a sharp life pivot – launching their own interior design studio.

To market themselves, they produced a cable TV show in 2022 documenting real-life room transformations. The show worked for visibility, but the sustained effort of running it – the typical grind of being a content creator, whether on TV or online – was exhausting.

Through that experience, they also realized something critical: a lot of people want design advice, but very few are willing to pay professional rates for it. In the US, a professional design studio typically starts at $3,000 per room – which works out to $10,000 or more for an average apartment. As a result, 83% of homeowners and 97% of renters handle interior design themselves.

So the founders decided to build a self-serve design platform. But they quickly identified another problem: people struggle to design from a blank canvas. Staring at an empty prompt field – the ChatGPT experience – produces results that professionals would find, at best, eccentric.

In practice, most people don't design from scratch – they browse Pinterest and Instagram for inspiration images and try to replicate something they already like. That insight drove the founders to skip prompts entirely and build a catalog of professionally designed starting points instead.

The platform is subscription-based. And while subscription revenue is much smaller than what the founders used to earn on individual professional projects, the real money isn't there – it's in commissions on furniture sales.

This is actually where interior designers make most of their income. Commission structures vary by category and retailer, but typically run 10–30%. The US furniture market is worth roughly $172 billion, and designers accounted for 6–7% of that volume in pre-2020 data – which at today's market size could represent $10B or more in designer-influenced purchases annually. At typical commission rates, that works out to roughly $2 billion in annual earnings for designers across the industry.

The opportunity is established enough that there are already specialized platforms helping designers streamline furniture resale for clients. Alcove ([related review](/review/poltora-cheloveka-na-7-rynka)) raised $2.5M in 2022 before even launching – and is still operating today.

03 /Opportunities

The home renovation market – design, construction, and furniture together – is enormous. And whether you consider interior design an extension of renovation or renovation an extension of design, both the spending and the earning are substantial.

This market is also overwhelmingly traditional and technology-averse. Anyone who has recently renovated an apartment knows this from personal experience.

That said, a growing number of startups are beginning to bring new technology to bear here. A few examples – there are more, though still not enough to call this a "tech" market. Which means the opportunity set is still wide open.

FlipSpaces ([related review](/review/samyj-nadjozhnyj-sposob-zarabotat-na-tehnologijah)) is an Indian startup that raised $42M – $35M of it in May this year – focused specifically on commercial interiors: offices, retail, schools, healthcare, co-working spaces, hotels, and restaurants.

Livspace, also from India, works the residential side of the same market. After its most recent round in 2022, it was valued at $1.2B. Negotiations for a new round are currently underway at a lower valuation of around $700M – but that's still a substantial number, confirming that the market and the tech-forward approach are both real.

The general direction: building technology platforms for large, conservative, digitally underdeveloped service markets. The more specific opportunity: doing that specifically in interior design, home renovation, and furniture sales – which is what today's Madespace review is really pointing toward.