Once You Own the Home, How Do You Design It?

Design capsules offer a curated approach to home design, helping make smarter furnishing choices and avoid expensive mistakes.

By: Melissa Dittmann Tracey

Buying a home is one thing, but figuring out how to furnish it can be an entirely different challenge.  

Many consumers now turn to online retailers to furnish their homes. A 2025 HomeByMe survey found that 43% of U.S. consumers now make more than half of their furniture purchases online.

Jill Blackburn turned online when searching for a dresser for her daughter’s bedroom.  

“I believe there were over a thousand options,” Blackburn says.

She picked one, but the experience didn’t go as planned. The dresser arrived, her husband tried to assemble it, and as Blackburn recalls, “It just never worked out.” Ultimately, it was money wasted.

But that experience helped spark an idea: What if furnishing a home could work more like a design capsule—giving homeowners a curated selection of pieces without making them choose from thousands of options?  

Blackburn called up longtime friend and interior designer Asia Gajderowicz. From there, they co-founded Chicago-based MyDesigner, a virtual furnishing service that combines technology with design expertise to offer up curated design capsules. Rather than overwhelming homeowners with endless choices, the service creates a collection based on a client’s space, lifestyle, budget and design preferences.

Help Clients Furnish With Confidence

The concept is similar to a fashion capsule, but instead of receiving a small collection of clothing, homeowners get a curated grouping of furniture suited to their needs.  

The process starts with an extensive questionnaire designed to mimic the questions an interior designer would ask during an in-person consultation. Clients can provide photos of their rooms and answer questions about existing hardwoods floors, furniture, metal finishes, and colors and design preferences.  

Lifestyle matters, too. Homes with children or pets, for example, may call for performance fabrics and easy-care rugs.  

Rather than presenting one prescribed look, the service offers several choices for each major piece. A living room capsule, for example, could include three sofas, three area rugs and three coffee tables. That gives homeowners room to make decisions without having to sift through an overwhelming number of products.

While the design-capsule concept with MyDesigner is currently focused on the Chicago area and the Midwest, Blackburn sees potential for the technology-backed approach to expand its service, giving consumers a more guided way to shop for furniture that replaces endless online scrolling.

Related: Home Staging Gets a ‘Merchandising’ Makeover

Avoiding Design Mistakes When Online Furniture Shopping

Outfitting a new home isn’t easy—especially for someone not trained in interior design. One of the biggest furnishing mistakes homeowners make is choosing pieces that are the wrong size of the room.  

“A lot people say, ‘I saw this sofa online. I liked it in the picture,’” Gajderowicz says. “But then it was delivered and it was overwhelming the space and way too big.”  

One simple technique Gajderowicz often recommends to avoid this is using painter’s tape to outline the dimensions of prospective pieces directly on the floor.

“It gives you a sense of how much room you have,” she says.

Space planning in a living room, for example, can help clients consider whether a room is better suited to a sectional, multiple sofas or a combination of chairs. Even sectionals can be configured in numerous ways, Gajderowicz says, rather than always defaulting to the familiar L-shaped design.  

Another common pitfall with online furniture shopping: falling in love with a photograph but failing to consider how the piece will function in the home.

Gajderowicz says homeowners should consider how they actually live, including whether they have children or pets and even how they prefer to sit—such as whether they like deep, relaxed seating or a more upright feel. Performance fabrics have also come a long way, she says. Fabrics and rugs designed for higher-use environments are now available is more attractive styles, making them a practical option for busy households.

But perhaps the biggest advice when online furniture shopping: Don’t get too caught up in what’s trending.

“When you’re buying furniture for your home, you should think about how your lifestyle is, how you live, and your personality,” Gajderowicz says. “You’re buying pieces that should last you for a long time.” After all, sofas can be costly investment, particularly when homeowners opt for higher-quality and custom pieces, which can cost several thousands of dollars.

That can mean choosing a more timeless sofa rather than making a major investment in a bold color or style simply because it is popular at the moment.

A curated approach to furnishing may help take some of the guesswork out of that next step in designing a home after closing. As Blackburn says, it can help homeowners avoid an expensive lesson from a sofa that may have looked perfect online but turned out to be completely wrong for the room. And with professional design guidance built into the process, homeowners may also find it easier to create a space that feels cohesive and thoughtfully designed.