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AI is NOT Your Mid-Century Design Friend

35 min readYou may already use AI to get input on many areas of your life. And you may feel like the convenience outweigh its many negatives. Maybe. But here where we talk about making right choices for your home, let me assure you, you will not get good advice or even peace of mind about your design options by asking AI.

To paraphrase a meme I saw recently, Hey, y’all don’t ask ChatGPT. Make friends with a nerd.

And I am so, so happy to be your mid-century design and remodeling nerd.

I’ve been irked by AI for a while. It seems like it is over promising and under delivering. And I’m always kind of on the lookout for more information to corroborate my opinion.

The Washington Post recently ran a top of the page headline piece titled something like, “Can AI Do Your Job?” The very first example they gave was, can it do the job of an architect or a designer. And the short answer is, “nope.”

On their very first example they asked it to create a digital floor plan based on a hand drawn floor plan. And it was literally just supposed to recreate a hand drawn sketch as a digital floor plan. The human version was very tidy and annotated with dimensions. The chat version? Just a bunch of rooms labeled. AND with a bizarre relocation of spaces, including a bathroom surrounded on three sides by corridors. Certainly not a useful replica and in no way an improvement.

Why is AI so bad at being a designer? And even worse at helping you plan a remodel for your mid-century home? I have thoughts.

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A flipped house is not a final answer with Un.flipping

55 min readI was thrilled to chat with Dana Jenkins and Colin Davis of the Instagram account @un.flipping,(who may have coined the phrase!) and have blown up online by sharing their five-year journey to add the soul back into their thoroughly flipped mid-century home.

We all know the story. You find an MCM ranch in your perfect neighborhood, only to click further into the listing to discover a flipper has been there first. They’ve ripped out the character and replaced it with trendy, generic finishes.

It’s a tragedy…(well, to us it is).

And many mid-century lovers believe it’s also the final answer for the home. Remodeling something that has been “updated” is wasteful, isn’t it? And it’s almost impossible to undo the damage to original finishes or find replacements for pieces that ended up in the dumpster.

Public Housing and Our Mid-Century Homes

Your mid-century house, and mine – just like 13 million solid ranches, tidy Levit cottages and charming post and beam homes built across the US between 1945 and 65 – might not strike you as “public housing.” But they ARE our country’s solution to a housing crisis.

You may be aware we’re having another housing crisis right now. But so far … we do not have another big solution.