From grey structure to approved interiors, room by room
How a four-level house went from bare brick to an approved design for every room: site photos, designs over them, a 3D model and a tour.
A house at grey structure is brick, concrete and dust. The owner is asked to choose floors, ceilings, lighting, joinery and furniture for every room, usually from a folder of reference photos of other people's houses. Then the tiler starts, and every change of mind costs money.
For one four-level family home I worked the other way round: show each room finished before anything is bought. This is the process.
1. Photograph every space as it is
Every room, passage, stair landing and the roof, from the angle a person would actually stand at. Basement hall, kitchen, dining area, bedrooms and washrooms on each floor, both side passages, the entrance from the yard, the rooftop.
These photos are the foundation. They carry the real proportions: where the beam drops, how deep the window sits, which wall the door is on.
2. Design on top of the photograph
Each design is produced over the photo of that same room, so the walls, openings, beams and stairs stay where they are. A beautiful render of a room that does not exist is useless to a contractor. A design where the window is in the right wall is a brief.
The design images are AI-assisted. I direct them: palette, materials, lighting, furniture type, what must not move. Then I check each one against the photo and the measured model, and reject the ones that cheat by widening a room or losing a column.
3. Hold one palette per floor
Without a rule, thirty rooms become thirty moods. This house got two:
- Ground floor: chocolate and coffee. Walnut joinery, warm stone, cream upholstery.
- First floor: grey and olive. Lighter walls, fluted panels, olive accents in bedrooms.
The basement follows the ground floor's warmth, because it holds the second lounge, the dining room and a kitchen. The rooftop is its own thing: a glass lounge, lawn, seating and a barbecue.
4. Approve floor by floor
The owner reviewed one floor at a time. Each room was either approved or sent back with a note. Sent-back rooms were redone and filed as revised. The basement dining room, the side passage and the ground-floor lounge all went round more than once.
Approved images were kept in one folder per floor with numbered names, so "basement 02" means the same thing to the owner, to me and to the contractor.
5. Do the stairs as a sequence
Stairs connect every floor, and they are where a house feels cheap if nobody designed them. The stair core was done as six consecutive views: the door from the yard, the split entry where one flight goes up and one goes down, the way up from the basement, the ground landing, the first landing, and the descent from the roof. Seen in order, the materials and lighting stay consistent the whole way up.
6. Carry it into the measured 3D model
The house already existed as a 3D model built from the owner's sketches, with every dimension kept as written. The approved designs were carried into that model as furniture, finishes and lighting, room by room.
A check then compared the furnished model with the original: room positions, widths and depths, wall gaps, stairs, floor heights, columns and balconies all had to be unchanged. Nothing was enlarged to make an image look better.
The model has per-floor views, a cutaway, an exploded view and eye-level views inside each room, and it opens offline in a browser.
7. Make the tour
Each room got a short clip that moves from the site photo to the approved design. Those clips, in walking order, became one narrated home tour with subtitles: entrance, basement, ground floor, first floor, roof.
What this is and is not
It is a clear reference for finishes and layout, agreed before work starts. The contractor received one image per room.
It is not a construction drawing. Furniture and materials are interpretations of references, not exact products. The AI images can differ in small details from the measured model, and where they differ the model is right. Those limits are written into the handover, because a convincing picture will be treated as a promise unless it says otherwise.
Case study with the before and after boards: Home Renovation Design. How the underlying model was built: A whole house from hand sketches, in Three.js. The service page is 3D house models and interior design visualisation.