Cynthia Ruff will help you reimagine a room of your home — but in a different way that you might expect. A blogger turned interior design consultant, Ruff, on her popular website Ruff Details, shows how brainstorming with the help of AI has inspired her own space. Now, she’s willing to help you with yours.
Ruff launched her first blog on thrifted fashion in 2014. In 2015, her second blog, Darling Down South, got a boost when she blogged about shopping for the Lilly Pulitzer collection at Target, and the post went viral. She never expected 100,000 people to read a simple post about shopping — or thousands more to share it on Facebook. But they did, resulting in higher traffic and a higher ranking in Google search results.
“It gave me more confidence,” she says.
Credit: Photo by Gabi Valladares
Credit: Photo by Gabi Valladares
With fresh encouragement, Ruff continued to dedicate evenings and weekends to lifestyle blogging. An almost-native of Atlanta (her family moved here just before the 1996 Olympics), she completed a bachelor’s degree in finance at Kennesaw State University, at the urging of her parents, and had a full-time career in sales and finance, alongside lifestyle blogging, for several years.
Then, in 2018, her husband, Evan, cofounder and CEO of OXOS Medical, suggested she quit her job and focus solely on blogging.
“He encouraged me because he saw that same entrepreneurial spark that he possessed, and he figured I should try it while I’m young and can take the risk — something he had done with his various Atlanta startups ever since he graduated from Georgia Tech.”
Credit: Photo courtesy of Cynthia Ruff/AI
Credit: Photo courtesy of Cynthia Ruff/AI
In 2023, Ruff launched the most recent iteration of her blog, Ruff Details. All her most popular content from the past eight years is still there, but the new blog is more reflective and personal. Whereas Darling Down South often focused on how-tos and recaps on designer showhouses, Ruff Details depicts the author’s journey in decorating her own home, a 100-year-old craftsman located in Buckhead.
She has carefully thought out this rebranding. During the pandemic, Ruff opened an online vintage resale shop to discover more about her audience’s buying power. She learned that for items related to home decor, her audience had less price consideration for anything under $40 — items priced at $39 would sell out faster than items for $45, for example. Posts about secondhand items and DIY decorating garnered attention as well. One post about a chair she reupholstered, she recalls, “blew people’s minds.”
“I tend to gravitate toward a colorful, traditional interior blending mid-century modern furniture with pops of print and patterns throughout,” she says. “My ultimate interior design goal for this house is to infuse it with color while paying homage to its historic age.”
But Ruff doesn’t simply shop for secondhand treasures and hope for the best. Instead, she developed a way to brainstorm using AI software, called Midjourney. The platform reminded her of a computer game from her childhood, and she spent hours learning to write AI prompts.
“I thought, wow, this is incredible,” she says. “I spent days learning to get good responses. I was enamored with it.”
Credit: Photo courtesy of Cynthia Ruff/AI
Credit: Photo courtesy of Cynthia Ruff/AI
Ruff says that combining her own taste with her husband’s taste has been a source of inspiration for her AI images.
“My ideas come from my struggles,” she says with a chuckle. “My husband is a minimalist, and I love anything girlie and decorative. … So, I’m often combining mid-century modern furniture with more traditional backdrops.”
She offers this example: “Sometimes I’ll ask for something like a Herman Miller style in a Parisian apartment with traditional molding and these colors — and I might do 10 iterations of it.”
While she’s careful to be specific in her prompts, the results are often a large pool of images of a room. She narrows that to the most accurate of the bunch before sharing the best one with her blog audience. Next, she uses Google Lens to find the products, so interested blog viewers are able to shop for similar paint colors, furnishings and other elements of the AI-developed room.
The information is easy to digest and the budget is moderate. “I don’t overwhelm the post with links and, price-wise, I try to do more items that are middle of the road.”
Ruff maintains that using AI to brainstorm for home decor isn’t competition for the interior design industry. Designers can benefit from using platforms such as Midjourney, she says, and brainstorming with AI doesn’t take the place of their expertise.
“Interior designers are like doctors; they have years of training,” she says. “It’s hard for the average consumer to know what to do — that’s why DIY bloggers resonate with people.”
Ruff is also able to help first-time DIY-ers and decorators come up with their own custom interior plan. They can reach out and complete a survey, which helps Ruff understand “how [they] want the room to feel.”
Credit: Courtesy of Cynthia Ruff/AI
Credit: Courtesy of Cynthia Ruff/AI
The service, which is handled virtually and costs $179, offers clients four renders for one room in their home, a personalized consultation, one edit to the favorite render, plus a specified product sourcing and shopping list. For those who want a more hands-on experience, the website includes instructions on how to use Midjourney for their own interior design brainstorm.
Even with Ruff Details’ current momentum, Ruff says she is dialing back a bit from full-time blogging. She’s having a baby this winter, and her top posts continue to drive traffic and affiliate income through the various links on the site pages. She also accepts sponsored ad placements from brands such as Walmart and Home Depot.
“The decade of work I’ve put into my channels has created a nice passive stream of income, so I don’t have to work 60-plus hours a week on it anymore,” she says. “Now I would consider myself a part-time blogger, in between wrangling a household, scheming up my next thing and designing our new home. We’re just in the beginning phase of transforming it and can’t wait to see it all come together.”
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