Alcove interior-design copilot, Erik Smith
An education-first interior-design copilot. It learns your taste, teaches the why behind each pick, and sources real furniture across retailers.
The Problem
Furniture apps sell you a look, then leave. A mood board here, a room scan there, never the reasoning. So the next purchase is another guess, and taste never transfers. The ones that do recommend products rank by whatever pays the best affiliate cut.
The Insight
Five years designing retail settings and range direction at IKEA taught me taste is teachable. People don't want a style handed down. They want to know why it works, so the next call is theirs.
The Pivot
Alcove started as an augmented-reality app. I killed the AR, and the project got stronger for it.
- AR placement was a feature trying to be a whole product: Every furniture app can drop a 3D model on your floor. None of them can teach you why the room works. The defensible thing was the teaching.
- Web over native: An education-first copilot belongs where people already research a purchase: a browser tab, shareable by link, indexable, no install.
- Kept the domain, changed the form: The IKEA spatial expertise carried straight over. Only the delivery changed, from placing one object in a room to shaping the whole room's taste and budget.
How It Works
- 1. Set your voice and your room: Choose how much design talk you want, new / comfortable / pro. Copy and depth adapt across the whole app to what you already know.
- 2. Take the taste quiz: Three quick rounds, a drifting word cloud and mood tiles, map you to one of 24 real substyles. The words you skip count as much as the ones you keep.
- 3. Learn the why: Every pick carries the design principle it applies, in plain language, so the taste is yours to reuse.
- 4. Shop across retailers, on budget: Real, shoppable pieces filtered by your context and a per-room budget seeded from market-median spend. You can see what got cut and why.
Design Decisions
- Education over automation: Auto-decorating demos better, and I still didn't build it. If the app makes every call for you, nothing sticks for the next room.
- Truthful curation over affiliate maximization: Rank by fit, disclose every affiliate link, and show why pieces were cut, so the shortlist is one you can actually trust.
- Expertise levels as the copy spine: One voice setting, new / comfortable / pro, reskins the entire app. Authored once as a shared layer that every screen reads from.
- Prerender for the AI-crawler era: Static HTML per route so JS-blind crawlers and LLMs read the real content. Without it they'd see one empty div. Structured data on every page.
- Accessible by default: WCAG 2.1 AA, keyboard and screen-reader paths, visible focus everywhere. The people most tools ignore are the ones I design for first.
Live in beta at alcove-ruddy.vercel.app.
Erik Smith, Design Engineer & UX Designer