Interior Design

This section will walk through various Midjourney tools and techniques to generate high-quality interior design imagery. You can use these visual assets to plan your own home renovation, or accelerate your interior design business.

We will introduce a prompting template -- think of it as a general recipe that can be reused for every single image generation. We will also discuss Midjourney features that are particularly helpful for interior design:

Remix Mode to generate controlled variations
Permutation Prompts to systematically explore combinations of options
The /describe Command to reverse-engineer prompt modifiers from an image
Linking an inspiration image in the prompt

Starting from Scratch

Prompting Template

In this section, we will provide a repeatable template that can be universally used by interior designers. It consists of the following elements:

subject
style
color
mood and lighting
composition
tags/extras

We will eventually chain these elements into a single prompt using additive prompting. Now let's walk through an example and discuss each of these elements in turn.

Subject

living room

The subject refers to the key element to be illustrated. This can be a particular room, a specific furniture piece, or (if you're willing to venture into exterior design) a building façade or a garden.

Style

art deco style

The style can be expressed in terms of:

An established interior design style (e.g. art deco)
The name of an interior designer (e.g. India Mahdavi)
A recognizable furniture brand (e.g. Ikea)
A theme from outside the realm of interior design (e.g. Disney for a children's room)

Color

green and black

In this section of the prompt, you can either specify a set of colors (e.g. green and black) or the general tone (e.g. warm tones).

Mood and Lighting

moody

The mood describes the general ambiance. It can be an abstract term (e.g. mysterious, cozy, energetic, happy) or a specific type of lighting (e.g. low key lighting).

Composition

wide view

Finally, composition refers to the perspective and angle of the image. It can also be specified as a camera lens type (e.g. 50mm).

Tags/Extras

magazine quality shot, high-resolution photography, interior design --ar 16:9

Since high quality images are always desirable in interior design, the prompt above is useful in virtually all situations. The final tag refers to the aspect ratio.

Putting it Together

To obtain the final prompt, simply chain all the elements above:

living room | art deco style | green and black | moody | wide view | magazine quality shot, high-resolution photography, interior design --ar 16:9

Here is Midjourney's interpretation of this prompt:

Interior Design Image — Art deco livingroom by Midjourney.

Remix Mode: Incremental Prompt Tweaks

Since prompting is more of an art than a science, we rarely get it right the first time. Image generation is an iterative process and requires multiple iterations of prompt tweaking.

In Midjourney, you might be tempted to copy-and-paste a previously issued prompt and then modify it. But there's a more effective way to incrementally get closer to the desired output! The technique is called Remix.

Remix allows you to generate variations of an output that you like, with modifications in the prompt. For instance, say that we wanted to preserve as much as possible of the art deco livingroom above, but change the color palette to burnt orange.

First, we need to activate Remix mode:

Type /settings into Discord.
In the panel that opens up, click on the "Remix mode" button:

We can now tweak the image above by clicking on the "Vary" button under it:

Vary Screenshot — How to produce variations of an image in Midjourney.

Since we activated Remix mode, we'll see an option to modify the prompt before producing the variation. This is the chance to replace the green color palette with orange:

Updating the prompt — How to change the color palette in the prompt.

The output is indeed a very similar living room with the one above, but with an updated color palette:

Orange Livingroom — Art deco livingroom in burnt orange color palette.

Permutation Prompts

When it comes to interior design, we don't always know what we want. We spend time looking for inspiration, building moodboards, and comparing various options.

Midjourney offers a convenient way of sweeping through combinations. Say that we are trying to decide between two interior design styles (art deco and bohemian) and two color palettes (green and burnt orange). With the Permutation Prompts feature, we can quickly visualize all 2x2=4 options.

To achieve this, we will replace the style and color elements of the prompt with lists of options. The style element becomes:

{art deco, bohemian}

Note that the options are enclosed within braces and separated by commas. The color element becomes:

{green and black, burnt orange and black}

Putting it all together, the new prompt is:

living room | {art deco, bohemian} | {green, burnt orange} and black | moody | wide view | magazine quality shot, high-resolution photography, interior design --ar 16:9

Note that, unfortunately, 4 is the maximum number of combinations currently supported. Midjourney will ask for your confirmation to expand the prompt into 4 jobs. Here are the results:

	green	orange
art deco
bohemian

Starting from an Inspiration Image

When it comes to interior design, rarely ever do we start from scratch. We usually have an inspiration board with a handful of images that reflect desired styles, pieces of furniture, or general mood. In this section, we will discuss how to coerce the AI to take inspiration from a reference image.

Say that we feel inspired by a photo of a coastal living room we found in Architectural Digest, and want to envision a bedroom in this style. In Midjourney, there are two ways of leveraging this reference image: via the /describe command, and by directly linking to the reference image.

The `/describe` Command

The describe command is very intuitive: given an image, it returns a prompt that would generate something similar. Simply type /describe in the Discord input box, then attach the reference image.

Midjourney Describe — Output of Midjourney's /describe command for an Architectural Digest photo.

We can reuse these modifiers to retain the style of the original image, but change the subject (i.e., bedroom instead of livingroom). The table below uses the prompting categories established in the previous section to list the prompt modifiers we can borrow:

Prompt cateogry	Modifier borrowed from /describe output
style	`eva rothschild, lilia alvarado, beach portraits style, organic architecture, modernist influences, perfectionist style`
color	`white and wood tones, light pink and light brown`
mood and lighting	`zen-inspired, en plein air beach scenes, playfully intricate, sleek`

We can now plug these modifiers into our prompt template:

bedroom | eva rothschild, lilia alvarado, beach portraits style, organic architecture, modernist influences, perfectionist style | white and wood tones, light pink and light brown | zen-inspired, en plein air beach scenes, playfully intricate, sleek | wide view | magazine quality shot, high-resolution photography, interior design --ar 16:9

Coastal Bedroom — Coastal bedroom generated by Midjourney (prompt engineering via the /describe command).

Linking to the Reference Image

While the /describe command was valuable in descovering prompt modifiers that get us close to the inspiration image, it does require quite a bit of work. A quicker (but less controllable) way of taking inspiration from an existing image is to link it directly in the prompt:

Paste the reference image into Discord
Right-click on it, then click "Copy Link"
Issue an /imagine command that contains the link of the image, followed by your desired content, e.g. https://s.mj.run/nM0nPTB7ZrY coastal bedroom --ar 16:9

Practice: Remembering Chelsea Hotel

The Chelsea Hotel is an iconic New York City landmark built between 1883-1884. Throughout the years, it has hosted and inspired numerous cultural icons like Janis Joplin or Andy Warhol. Today, as it faces the danger of extinction, it is a bitter-sweet reminder of the passage of time.

This exercise invites you to take inspiration from the maximalist style of its few remaining residents and produce imagery of a Chelsea Hotel-inspired livingroom. Here are some ideas for experimentation:

Issue trial prompts to gauge whether Midjourney knows about the Chelsea Hotel.
Find imagery online of the hotel interiors.
Use the /describe command to figure out style modifiers.
Link to inspiration images directly, and add modifiers borrowed from the step above.

Solution

Choosing an Inspiration Image

The Guardian has an article titled "Bohemian Rhapsody: Inside New York's Chelsea Hotel". We can take inspiration from their hero image (and also note the double entendre in the title, where "bohemian" refers both to the Queen song and the design style).

Borrowing Modifiers from `/describe`

After running the /describe command on the reference image, we can build the following table with prompt modifiers:

Prompt cateogry	Modifier borrowed from /describe output
style	`david lachapelle, thomas nast, john anster fitzgerald, primitivist style, maximalism, baroque exuberance, opulent, rich and immersive, quirky details, life in new york city, gilded age`
color	`red, gold`
mood and lighting	`colorful melancholy, naturalistic nostaligia`

Finally, we can put together the following elaborate prompt:

livingroom in the chelsea hotel | david lachapelle, thomas nast, john anster fitzgerald, primitivist style, maximalism, baroque exuberance, opulent, rich and immersive, quirky details, life in new york city, gilded age | red, gold | colorful melancholy, naturalistic nostaligia, disturbingly whimsical | wide view | magazine quality shot, high-resolution photography, interior design --ar 16:9

And here is what a Chelsea Hotel-inspired livingroom looks like:

Chelsea Hotel Livingroom — Livingroom inspired by the Chelsea Hotel, generated via Midjourney.

Join us on X, with the hashtag #PromptingForArtists to share your results, queries, or comments.

References

To cite this content, please use:

@article{promptingforartists,
    author       = {Julia Turc},
    title        = { Prompting for Artists - Interior Design Prompting},
    howpublished = {\url{https://promptingforartists.storia.ai}},
    year         = {2023}
}