Can AI tell me if my sofa will fit through the door?

Every AI interior render answers the wrong question. It shows you the sofa in the room. It has nothing at all to say about how the sofa got there, and the sofa getting there is the part that goes wrong, on a Tuesday morning, with two people and a van outside.

Why a render cannot answer this

• There are no dimensions in an image model. It arranges pixels into a plausible photograph. Nothing in that process has a centimetre in it, which is the same reason renders get rug sizes and hallway furniture wrong.
• The route is not in the picture. Access is a problem about the front door, the hallway, the stair turn and the door into the room. A render shows one room from one angle, so three quarters of the problem is off camera.
• Doors in renders are decoration. They are drawn at whatever width balances the composition, often noticeably wider than a real internal door, and frequently in a slightly different place from yours.
• Furniture in renders has no rigid frame. Real sofas are a hardwood or steel skeleton with a little foam give. A render has no idea which parts of that shape are negotiable.

The four measurements that decide it

• The clear opening, not the door size. Open the door fully and measure between the stops, or between the leaf and the frame. A common internal door leaf of 762 mm gives you roughly 71 to 73 cm of real gap. Take the door off its hinges and you get about 4 to 5 cm back, which is often the whole margin.
• The sofa's smallest face. Unscrew the feet first, since that is commonly 5 to 8 cm free. Then compare the smaller of the depth and the height against the opening. If that fits, the sofa goes through on its side. If it does not, you are relying on tilting it through diagonally, using the door's 198 cm of height, which needs clear space on both sides to rotate.
• The turn. This is what kills most deliveries. Coming down a hallway and turning through a side door, you need the hallway width plus the depth of the door reveal to be in the region of the sofa's length. A 200 cm sofa into a 100 cm hallway is a genuine problem, and no amount of pushing changes the geometry.
• The worst point on the whole route. Walk it with the tape: the front door threshold, the coat hooks, the newel post at the bottom of the stairs, the half landing, the ceiling height above the stair turn, and any radiator projecting off a hallway wall, which is exactly the obstacle renders erase in why AI deletes the radiator from your room render.

The test that actually settles it

Cut a piece of cardboard to the sofa's end profile, depth by height, and carry that through the route you would carry the sofa. It costs ten minutes and a flattened box, and it finds the newel post, the low ceiling at the turn and the door that only opens to 80 degrees, all of which are invisible in a photograph and immovable on the day. If the cardboard does not make it, the answers are a modular sofa, a model with bolt off arms, a knock down frame, or a smaller piece. The same clearance thinking for what happens once it is inside is in whether AI designed furniture will fit a narrow hallway and the longer version in our guide to AI interior design for narrow hallways.