Product build
ScooScoo.homes
AI home portrait e-commerce
I designed and built ScooScoo end to end: a generation pipeline that turns a photo of any house into stylized artwork, ready to print and ship, in under five minutes, sold through a zero-inventory Shopify storefront.
The problem
A friend moving out of her childhood home asked if I could turn a photo into a watercolor she could give her parents. She wanted the crooked porch and the oak tree, not a generic house. That conversation started it. The existing options were clear: hire an illustrator at $200–$500 and wait weeks, or buy stock art of a different house. I knew the buyers existed — real estate agents buying closing gifts, new homeowners, people letting go of a home — but the price and wait time kept most from ever ordering.
Stock art of generic houses doesn't work. People want their house: the specific roofline, the tree in the yard, the color of the front door. That specificity is exactly what makes traditional illustration expensive and slow.
The technical build
ScooScoo replaces the illustrator with a generation pipeline. Users upload a photo of their home, pick a style (watercolor, line art, architectural sketch, pop art), and receive multiple generated options within minutes.
Generating an image is easy now. The hard part is making it the right image. A home portrait needs to be recognizable to the homeowner, which means the model has to preserve specific structural details (window count, roof shape, porch configuration) while still looking like deliberate art, not a filtered photo. Most of the work was prompt engineering and model selection against that bar: recognizable house, deliberate art.
The early version kept turning front porches into bay windows. Adding a depth-map preprocessing step that identified the main structural planes fixed the worst distortion. The pipeline preprocesses the uploaded photo, matches the chosen style to a prompt tweaked for that style, runs generation with multiple candidates, filters out obvious errors like missing windows and color bleeding, and upscales the best one for print. Shopify handles checkout and orders go straight to a fulfillment partner; I never touch inventory.
I tested on a handful of houses I knew well — my own townhouse, a friend's split-level, a neighbor's Victorian — and then pulled several dozen more from real estate listings. Structural fidelity was scored by comparing generated output against the original photo's key landmarks.
Results
The pipeline turns a photo into a print-ready portrait in under five minutes: a custom watercolor-style portrait of someone's home, printed on archival paper and shipped to their door, costs a fraction of what a human illustrator would charge.
I stumbled into the real estate channel when an agent friend ordered five portraits for clients closing the same week. Agents became the strongest buyers: they order closing gifts in volume, often the day before closing, because the turnaround can handle it.