Interior Design with the Collective
Interior design can be an act of alignment: a client’s instincts, a designer’s vision, a procurement team’s constraints, and the hundreds of decisions that must converge before a space comes to life. Reve has been bridging these gaps for the Collective.
Sitting at the intersection of commercial interior design and procurement, the Collective brings 30 years of experience designing and furnishing the spaces where people work. From concept to final furnishing, they manage the full arc: balancing client vision, design intention, and relationships with over 300 suppliers.
With Reve, the team has compressed weeks of back-and-forth into days, brought many rendering processes in-house, and opened the design process to project managers, sales, and leadership. Small design swaps can now be made by project managers, freeing up designers to define vision. Decisions that used to wait for a finished render now happen earlier, with broader input and less friction.
We sat down with the team to talk about how Reve has rewired the way they work with clients and where they hope the technology leads them next.
How has Reve changed the way your design team works?
What used to take weeks of concepting can now be explored in the first few days, giving the team and client a clearer point of view early on. Impactful visuals reduce client back-and-forth and push decisions forward — they are critical to our work.
What makes Reve well-suited to interior design and architecture?
As a commercial furniture dealer, most of our products are made to order with hundreds of specification options, yet manufacturer imagery is often limited, making client visuals time-consuming to produce. Clients also tend to fixate on finishes. Reve lets us place proposed solutions in environments that match the overall vision, and swap finishes quickly and easily. What used to take hours now takes a fraction of the time. Changes like this can also be made by project managers now — it does not need to hit the design team.
How has Reve woven itself into the team? What does a project feel like now compared to before?
It’s become part of the early design conversation rather than a separate step. We’re able to explore options quickly, which makes the process feel more engaging and flexible.
Now, we execute visuals quickly and gain weeks back for decisions and alterations.
Rendering used to mean specifying every piece of furniture and finish, assembling mood boards, and sending everything to an external company to execute. Hundreds of decisions, made under tight deadlines with little room for changes. Now, with Reve, we execute visuals quickly and gain weeks back for decisions and alterations.
We can also transform our existing product catalog on the fly. A solution already rendered in ash and white can be instantly updated to black and walnut for a different client — no rebuild required.
Beyond the design team, who else now participates in the creative/review process because of Reve?
Reve has expanded participation across the project team, allowing project managers, sales teams, and leadership to play a more active role in moving the design process forward. Instead of relying solely on designers to create early concepts, teams can engage in conversations around ideas sooner, provide feedback earlier, and help shape direction before significant design time is invested. This allows ideas to evolve faster and with broader input.
What measurable operational changes have you seen since adopting Reve?
Reve has positively impacted many areas of our workflow, including faster concept visualization, increased design exploration, and quicker alignment with clients and internal teams. We are able to evaluate more ideas and iterations in shorter timeframes, and it has helped us reduce our need to outsource renderings. While AI in general has not replaced the need for design expertise, it has helped improve efficiency and reduce some of the time traditionally spent on early-stage development and revisions.
A solution already rendered in ash and white can be instantly updated to black and walnut for a different client — no rebuild required.
Has Reve changed the way clients engage during presentations or review cycles?
Reve has changed the pace of client conversations by allowing us to respond more quickly with more developed visualizations earlier in the design process. Discussions have become more decisive because clients can react to visual concepts sooner, creating more meaningful feedback earlier in the process. While AI-generated visuals still require refinement and multiple iterations before reaching a final product to present to a client, the ability to bring ideas to life faster has created more engaging conversations.
The 15-Minute Proposal
This is a simple in-house render we would have incorporated into a proposal package for a client. It was enhanced with Reve. What might have been a long rendering process is now a polished, client-ready visual edited and finessed in under 15 minutes.
The 100 Iterations
This is a visual that had about 100 iterations. Design direction from the client was coming in incrementally, so adjusting and editing along the way with Reve was really quick, despite how many iterations there were. What could have been a hundred separate rebuilds became one continuous thread.
Material-Locked
This was a high-level design package, where we wanted the in-scene renderings to follow the material palettes outlined — down to specific materials, textures, and exact furniture and architectural forms.
These chats walk through the team’s explorations, swaps, and in-scene renderings in real time.
The renders, locked:
Working with AI is like being a Creative Director — it handles execution so we can focus on driving the vision.
What is it about how the Collective operates that made you want to explore AI early?
There’s an openness to testing new tools if they can improve clarity, speed, or the client experience. Reve felt like a natural extension of that mindset rather than a major shift. We also try to prioritize being an agile and curious team, and we are always looking for ways to push our design presentations to the next level.
Where do you hope technology leads you in the future?
Working with AI is like being a Creative Director — it handles execution so we can focus on driving the vision. Our hope going forward is to deepen that, training it to better understand the nuances of our niche industry. The goal is better outcomes, not just faster ones.
The Collective is a contract office furniture and architectural interiors firm built on connection, creativity, and purpose. Our story reflects where we’ve come from and where we’re going, from our multi-dealer roots to a unified, design-forward organization. We tell it consistently, and we prove it through the spaces we create.
Reve is partnering with architecture studios, interior design firms, and rendering teams to reshape how early-stage design and client visualization come together.Get in touch.