Style transfer is the process of applying the visual style of one image (colours, textures, brushwork, mood) to the content of another, so the second image keeps its subject but takes on the first one’s look.
Neural style transfer
The term became widely known with neural style transfer, described by Gatys, Ecker and Bethge in 2015: a neural network separated an image’s content from its style and recombined them, famously turning photos into “paintings” in the manner of Van Gogh. It works well for artistic effects but does not understand objects; it repaints surfaces rather than replacing furniture.
In interior design today
When people say “style transfer” for rooms, they usually mean something different: keep the room’s architecture and change its design style (for example from traditional to Japandi), which means swapping furniture, materials and decor, not just recolouring. Modern tools do this with diffusion models guided by the structure of the photo (ControlNet, img2img), plus a style description or preset.
In Tigmi, choosing one of the 16 styles is exactly this kind of transfer: your room, a new style.