The slowest part was never the design.

Both of my parents are architects.

My mother spent her career on commercial work — the quick-service restaurants and coffee shops you’ve stood in without ever thinking about who drew them. My father worked on bigger canvases: resort hotels, tilt-up industrial buildings, office campuses for aerospace companies. Two very different practices. One identical problem.

Clients approve things they can’t picture. They nod at the floor plan, sign off on the elevation, and then — weeks later, standing in front of a rendering, or worse, a framed wall — they finally see it. And they want changes.

Nobody is at fault. Reading drawings is a learned skill; architects spend years acquiring it and then forget that everyone else hasn’t. The industry’s answer is renderings — beautiful, expensive, and static. The moment the client says “what if the kitchen opened to the yard?”, the rendering is obsolete and the loop restarts: redline, remodel, re-render, re-present. Each turn of that loop is measured in weeks. Add plan check and it’s measured in months.

I watched this loop my whole childhood, at two dinner tables’ worth of war stories. Later I watched strangers live it on television — homeowners on renovation shows squinting at plans, unable to picture their own house. The gap between drawings and understanding isn’t an edge case. It’s the industry default.

Onyx is built on a simple bet: if the design lives as a single parametric model — not a pile of drawings — then a change is just an edit. Type “widen the great room by four feet,” and the model updates, the floor plan follows, the cost range re-computes, and a new rendering is minutes away. The client watches the building change instead of imagining it.

That’s the whole idea. Not replacing architects — my family would disown me — but deleting the weeks between “what if” and “oh, that’s what it looks like.”

Today Onyx does the parts we can stand behind: a parametric studio you edit in plain English, cost ranges grounded in real vendor pricing, drawing sets generated from the model, and a fast photoreal render pipeline. Next up — editing the photoreal rendering itself, live. We’re building it now.

— Luke, founder