My wife had a baby last week.
I knew the day was coming, the doctor told us as much. So, to prepare, a few months ago I embarked on the project that this article is about. I wanted to have Buildlane make a new bed for my wife (something that would be comfortable for nursing) and I wanted to see if she could design it herself using the latest in Artificial Inteligence.
I am going to take you step-by-step through the process of designing furniture yourself using AI. And by the end we’re going to have an actual bed produced in a custom workshop that was designed using AI.
Setting Up Midjourney
We’re going to use a “generative AI image creation” tool to come up with the design. I tried a handful of these softwares including ones from Google, Adobe, and OpenAI. But the one I was most impressed with in terms of furniture was Midjourney.
Note that Midjourney is under active development, so some of these directions below might change. I’ll be trying to keep this article up-to-date as they make changes.
Midjourney just launched their new website, but they still use Discord to manage their users. Simply put, this means you have to create a Discord account before you can use Midjourney.
You may not be familiar with Discord so here is a step-by-step guide to getting started with Discord and then using Midjourney on their own website.
First, create a Discord account if you don’t already have one.
Next, you need to ‘Join the Beta’ at the Midjourney website.
You will then be prompted to ‘Accept Invite’ on the next screen. Click okay and you should be taken to Midjourney’s Discord server.
Now here is the tricky part. Go back to the Midjourney website and click ‘Sign In’.
It might ask you about permissions. Don’t worry about this, just click ‘Authorize’.
You should now be taken to the new ALPHA version of Midjourney.
Next, you need to pay for Midjourney, which costs $10/month. This is for the basic plan which includes 200 images per month. Come on, its $10, even just to try it its worth it. You can upgrade your Midjourney account by going to your account on the Midjourney website.
Designing Furniture Using Midjourney
You are going to interact with Midjourney as a chatbot. You will initiate a request using the input box at the top of the screen.
You will start with an initial descriptive prompt for what you are looking to make. We’re now going to bring in my bed project and I will show you exactly how we did it.
a bed with blue velvet fabric and a tall diamond tufted headboard
Once you type in your prompt and hit Enter you will receive something like this:
You now have four options for what to do with these four images. These options reveal themselves as you hover your cursor over the images or to the whitespace to the right.
Vary Subtle / Vary Strong
If Midjourney has created something along the lines of what you are thinking you click these to follow that idea to four more images. Depending on how close you think you are you can pick subtle or strong.
Rerun
This will give you four new images based on your initial prompt. This is rare. If you’re unhappy with your four images usually you want to go back and re-word the prompt to get results close to what you were thinking.
Selecting the Image
Once you have an image you really like you can click on it to get additional options. Mainly you can then make it high resolution or zoom out to expose more of the space.
Here were the first batch of images my wife and I saw:
First thing we noticed is that these are very blue. We have one of those boring, modern, homes where everything is in greyscale so we’re going to need to mute that blue a bit.
I’ve found at this stage it is best to just start with a completely new prompt. If you are having trouble with Midjourney understanding what you are trying to say you can be overly descriptive with your prompt. Don’t hesitate to write a crazy run-on sentence that is very specific with the adjectives of each element of the furniture. I’ve also found that Midjourney is pretty savvy with “industry terms” related to furniture, so don’t hold back.
a bed with blue/grey velvet fabric and a diamond tufted headboard
These weren’t bad results but we didn’t like any of them. We decided to change it up a bit just to freshen up the results.
queen bed with blue headboard that is diamond button tufted
The second one was actually pretty close to what my wife was imagining. Its funny that we wanted wings but didn’t specify that but got quite a few results that included wings. I would guess this is because tufted headboards often have wings out in the wild.
We pressed the Vary Strong button to get variations on that bed design.
Not quite there so we decided to give it a more descriptive prompt.
queen bed with blue/gray square headboard with wings that is diamond button tufted
My wife was really not a fan of the angled wings so we got even more descriptive. And this is often how it works, you’ll notice Midjourney taking liberties with information you are leaving out. Sometimes this has happy results, other times it just means you need to take that part of your prompt and add some descriptions to make it more clear.
queen bed with blue/gray square headboard and straight wings that is diamond button tufted
My wife really liked number three. We pretty much were done except she didn’t want any nailheads. And we certainly didn’t want matching nailheads on the lamps. You’ll notice these weird artifacts that kind of give away that these images were made with AI.
queen bed with blue/gray square headboard and straight wings that is diamond button tufted without any nailheads
We ended up trying this prompt several times but could never find a bed that we liked more than the previous one. I figured that was as close as we were going to get using Midjourney. We could fix the rest in post editing.
We went back up to the bed that we liked and clicked on it so we could get a high resolution version of the image..
Once you do that you will get a new set of buttons below the single image.
If you click the button “Upscale (Subtle)” the bot will produce a nice high resolution image for you. Note “Zoom Out 2x” is another fun button that will have the photographer step back a few feet so you get to see what else could be in the room.
Now that we’ve upscaled again, we have our final image produce using Midjourney.
You can get this high res photo by clicking the download icon in the top right.
Post Editing in Photoshop
This bed is now the perfect inspiration photo to submit to Buildlane with two exceptions:
- We don’t want nailheads on the wings
- That bench is hiding the footboard
Could you simply write “we don’t want nailheads on the wings” instead of removing them in Photoshop? Sure. But I believe it is easier for the workshop to understand your concept if the inspiration photo is as close as possible. This is also why I want to remove the bench, I want this bed to be as easy to understand as possible.
Removing the Bench
First, you’re going to need one of the newer version of Photoshop that includes their AI tools. This is their PS 2024 or PS Beta.
Much like Midjourney, Photoshop will give you three options of its attempt to satisfy your prompt. In this case PS was only able to replace the bench with something else. I choose this weird book object as I was now pretty close to removing the bench altogether.
I did another pass using the lasso tool and “remove” and it seemed to work this time.
Note when I did this it was two months ago and I was using PS 2024. PS Beta has since released which includes a new tool that can make objects disappear much better.
Removing the Nailheads
I got our head of design, Stephen, to laugh when I showed him my ingenious way of removing the nailheads. I simply made two rectangles and filled them using the eye-dropper tool.
Boom! There it is. We have designed a bed using AI and we are now ready to drop it into Buildlane.
For dimensions I measured my wall and figured out roughly what would make sense. I added our mattress height and kept the floor-to-mattress height what it is with our current bed.
For wood finish I picked a Buildlane stock finish that was closest to our nightstands (Alder Charcoal).
For fabric I brought my wife about seven swatches and she ended up picking a polyester velvet made by Michael Jon Designs. They are an LA-based fabric house that has really well priced polyester fabrics.
Taking an AI Image and Turning It Into a Technical Drawing
The one thing to remember about Midjourney is that it is simply creating an inspiration image. But unlike an inspiration image you might find somewhere on the Internet, an AI image is devoid of any associated information. What is the height of the legs? What is the pitch? How many yards do I need?
Midjourney has no idea. Plus, as you will often find out, Midjourney might add elements or “mistakes” that don’t make any sense when you show it to an upholsterer.
The next step to making this AI project come to life is with the good folks on the Buildlane design team.
Shop Drawing / Technical Specs
For this bed I simply give the design team my inspiration image and overall dimensions. I trust in their expertise making thousands of beds to figure out the rest.
What you won’t see on the Buildlane platform is our design team sitting down with the upholsterer to work out the details. One of our drafters then puts this all together using a system that includes the library of every Buildlane piece ever made. Pretty crazy stuff going on behind the scenes before you even see that first shop drawing.
This bed was actually pretty straightforward and I had few notes. You can imagine with more complicated and wild AI designs that there will be a lot more adjustments made by the design team to make the build a success.
Nonetheless, I did have a few changes before we got to the final approved drawing.
Building Time
I approved the shop drawing, the fabric was delivered, and my wood finish was selected. The AI designed bed was now in the Production Queue.
And what is cool about being the head of Buildlane I was able to push my way to the top of the Production Queue (hey, that baby wasn’t going to wait in line).
Two weeks later I got the email I had been waiting for. Our first AI piece of furniture was completed and I had finished photos to review.
Success
I was hoping this project would produce a piece of furniture that was usable for this article. But I was blown away when I saw the bed, it really looks exactly like the AI generated image.
The fabric is obviously different. I’m also no photographer and don’t know if it is possible to re-create that angle the inspiration appears in.
Well, finally, the question you have been wondering. What did my wife think of the new bed?
She was very very happy!
Conclusion
I looked around on the Internet to see examples of people using AI for furniture design. I found a few 3D-Printing projects, but nothing involving custom upholstery shops. Did we just make the first AI designed upholstered bed? Maybe we did.
I’m sure at this point your wheels are already spinning. Is AI imaging the new secret weapon of savvy designers to create something new? I think it is.
I can’t wait to see where this takes us.
