Style My Space, inside ChatGPT

Style My Space takes a photo of your room and gives it back redecorated. The image model doing the drawing is the replaceable part. What isn't replaceable is the library behind it: thirty named looks, each written down as a palette, materials, shapes, light, key pieces and a list of things to avoid. On the afternoon of 9 October I asked for that library somewhere else:

ok chatGPT plugins. THAT's marketing. let's do it... make our style my space wisdom into a chatgpt plugin. free marketing. easy

The plugin is the skills-only kind: no server, no hosting, no API calls back to the site. It is a zip of instructions that ChatGPT reads when a conversation fits them, six skills and the style library as text.

The best of the library, minus the names

The first build was done ten minutes after that message. I sent it straight back:

it would be good if publisher and or basically any name shows as “style-my-space.com” if at all possible... also double check in ../spacery if we have really packed the best of best into it

We hadn't. The first zip carried only the short version of each look. The second pass went through the product's own style specifications and prompts and brought over what makes a render come out right: the concrete pieces per look, an anchor piece per room type so a bedroom doesn't come back as a lounge, and the rules for people who rent. The ceiling stays as it is. A pendant hangs only where there's already a light point. A patterned floor arrives as a rug. Wood panelling becomes a folding screen or a fluted cabinet leaning on the wall. A sixth skill appeared too, for turning an inspiration photo into a look you can reuse.

restyle-room

a photo or description in; what stays, what goes, what comes in, where it sits and how it's lit, at one of three budgets

decode-a-look

an inspiration photo or board turned into a style for your own room

find-your-style

five questions, matched to two or three looks

room-quick-wins

improvements from free and five minutes to a weekend, plus staging for a sale or guests

shopping-plan

every piece of a look ranked by impact, bought in phases

where-to-start

which room of a home to do first

Thirteen of the thirty looks are designer presets, named after the designers behind them. Those names can't go into someone else's directory, so in the plugin they carry descriptive names (“Sculptural California Glamour”), and the build script fails if a name from its list of designers, studios, products and films turns up anywhere in the package.

There's a cost the README states plainly. Anyone who installs a plugin can read its files, and these include the style specifications and renter rules that the product's own README calls its intellectual property and keeps on the server. The plugin gives away the substance of the prompts, though not the prompts themselves.

Getting through the door

Two and a half hours later:

ok identitiy verified (yuck!) now uploading and checking skills... issues thus far: Make sure your privacy policy website is accessible.
Select a valid category.

The category had been a guess (“Lifestyle” isn't one) and became Creativity. The privacy page loaded fine in a browser, but the site is a JavaScript app, so anything that doesn't run scripts gets an empty shell. The fix was two plain HTML pages, privacy and terms, each with a new section saying the plugin collects nothing and sends nothing to style-my-space.com. They were live a minute and a half after the push, the zip went up again, and it went into review. The next afternoon:

ok plugin is apparently still under review -.-

Approved, and frozen

Fifteen days later, just before six in the morning on 24 October:

the plugin was approved! […] the only thing bugging me is perhaps the visuals, I think the logo actually never appears on the website.... just so people are enticed to use it

So the site got a logo that morning, an arched window. The first six suggestions didn't survive (“the new logos you suggested are whack af so let's try that again imagining you're a real designer”). The site also got a page for the plugin.

Version 1.0.1, with the new logo and a support link, was refused on upload:

We are not accepting more skills-only submissions at this time.

The skills-only route had closed since the upload, and a skills-only plugin can't later be given a server. The listing stays exactly as it was approved, old logo included. My reading of that, later the same day:

wow it's crazy that they basically “invited” me to that platform there's only like 10 other interior design plugins which I think is pretty exclusive... maybe...

Anything more would be a second plugin with a server behind it. The idea for that one:

you can basically use chatGPT on top of style-my-space, e.g. you can let openAI's image model do the work which would actually save us money and lots of it and probably still bring customers

Half of that is already in the first one. When someone asks to see their room and ChatGPT has an image tool, the restyle skill has it draw the room from the user's photo with the look's rules, check that the walls and windows didn't move, and try once more if they did. OpenAI pays for that picture. The second plugin is a written plan, nothing more yet.

the package

51 files: six skills, 30 style sheets and their references as Markdown, a manifest and a logo; no server

the build

one Node script that generates the style sheets from the product's style data, checks the listing against the directory's limits and the banned names, and zips it

in review

uploaded 9 October, approved by 24 October

listed

version 1.0.0, category Creativity, publisher style-my-space.com

Still rough

Nobody has been seen using it, me included. The transcripts show it built, submitted and approved, but no real conversation with it. The local test on the build day stopped at a login. Skills-only plugins come with no usage numbers, and no skill links back to the site, so there is no way to tell from here whether anyone installs it.

Reading the listing needs no account; installing it needs a ChatGPT login. It writes plans, and only draws the room where ChatGPT's own image tool is available. And the logo in the directory is the old one, for as long as the listing exists.