Settle: An Entire Project Stage, Visualised in Gendo
How Settle simplified its visualisation workflow by replacing Unreal Engine and extensive Photoshop work with Gendo.
80%
Time saved per image
Replaces Unreal + Photoshop
With Gendo
Competition
Success
Settle
Team Size
2 people
Location
London, UK
Co-founder
Andrew Friedenberg
Co-founder
Edward Meyers
Focus
Residential & Hospitality
Settle is a young London-based studio co-founded by Andrew Friedenberg and Edward Meyers, focused on creating unique residential and hospitality experiences. The practice strives to deliver high-design that is accessible for all — questioning preconceptions, exploring innovative design strategies, and adopting new technologies.
The team's ideas are backed by extensive experience at prestigious practices including Heatherwick Studio and Zaha Hadid Architects.
Visit Settle"Architects have to be generalists. Sometimes we wear the hat of the visualiser, CG artist and photographer — and that always limits the design narrative."
— Andrew Friedenberg
Exterior canvas — Frame retreat
The Gendo canvas Settle used to develop exterior visuals for the Frame agrotourism retreat.
Interior canvas — Frame retreat
The Gendo canvas Settle used to develop interior visuals for the Frame agrotourism retreat.
Meet Andrew Friedenberg & Edward Meyers
Founders, Settle
"We would highly recommend Gendo to other architects. In the noise of endless new AI tools, Gendo stands out as a company that fundamentally understands the user and provides an excellent service to them."
Generalist workload and visuals stuck at the end of every stage
Juggling the roles of visualiser, CG artist and photographer — without formal training in any of them — meant the team was rarely the best at any single one, which limited their ability to tell the design narrative.
Producing visuals also ended up being an incredibly time-consuming period sitting uncomfortably between the end of the design stage (does it ever end?) and a hard deadline. The more time spent improving the design, the less time was left for visualisation.
Without the resources to produce visuals in parallel with the design process, storytelling and decision-making from all parties became more prone to delays.
A dedicated architectural image generator, not a broad model
Settle is always on the lookout for promising new technologies. Gendo stood out immediately because it is a dedicated architectural image generator rather than a more general-purpose model — built around the way architects actually work.
"What stood out most was the friendly interface of the boards — they let us collaborate seamlessly, track progress of the design, and create workstreams that reused prompts and reference images to maintain design consistency."
That consistency across many images was critical for a competition submission.
Frame — an agrotourism retreat in Italy
Frame is an agrotourism retreat Settle designed for Openair Suites, a hospitality provider in Italy. An early-stage project of this kind needs a large volume of visuals — both to progressively iterate the design internally and to tell the story externally.
As a small start-up, Settle produces all of these visuals in-house. Historically that has been a massively labour-intensive process. For Frame, the team decided to try producing every visual for an entire project stage in Gendo.
From detailed 3D model straight into the canvas
Settle focused on a detailed 3D model, then simply brought screenshots into Gendo to produce visuals. That single shift removed an entire layer of tooling — no more pipelines into Unreal Engine, no more extensive Photoshopping.
The Gendo canvas became the place where the team iterated the design, kept variations side by side, and prepared presentation imagery for the client and the competition jury.
"The addition of video capabilities within Gendo has elevated the platform even further. The workflow is intuitive, and the thoughtfully crafted presets make it easy to transform still images into engaging visual narratives."
The Impact: ~80% less time, and clarity at every stage
Gendo saved Settle approximately 80% of the time it would have previously taken to produce a significantly less realistic image. The ability to generate near-photorealistic visuals at canvas speed meant the team could tell their design narrative more clearly — and clarity is everything when speaking to clients.
Key Outcomes
Interior visuals for the Frame agrotourism retreat, generated in Gendo.
Compared with the previous Unreal + Photoshop pipeline
A single canvas replaces the path from 3D model to final presentation imagery
Storytelling and decision-making no longer blocked at the end of a stage
Iterations and changes are reflected in the visuals as they happen
Imagery the client is now using in their own marketing
The client received the imagery very well and is using it extensively in marketing material for the agrotourism retreats. Settle hopes this leads to a built cabin soon.
Internally, the small team loved the tool and will be using it again. Gendo's images directly contributed to the success of the design in competition — the team was able to produce a large report with many images that helped sway the jury.
Working with Gendo's boards allowed continual iteration of the design with changes immediately reflected in the visuals. Many design decisions were made directly on the Gendo board.
"Gendo's images directly contributed to the success of our design in the competition. Many design decisions were made on the Gendo board."
"We would highly recommend Gendo to other architects. In the noise of endless new AI tools, Gendo stands out as a company that fundamentally understands the user and provides an excellent service to them."
Andrew Friedenberg
Founder, Settle
