Atelier: Family & Studio

A gallery for everything worth keeping: children's drawings framed on a wall, your design work on a lit desk, the masters in gilt frames. iPhone, iPad and Mac.

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Inspiration

I love books and visual art, any form of art, and I wanted one app for all of it. An app I used professionally was discontinued, and apps for family artwork focus only on the family. I wanted one place for every kind: my children's drawings, my own design work, the pictures that matter, and the art I love.

What it does

Capture your art, your family's artworks, or visual art that inspires you, so you see it again and again. Then organize it into collections, lay it out on a mood board, leaf through it on a lit designer's desk in the studio, or walk along a gallery wall where every drawing hangs framed at the size it was made. Public-domain paintings from The Met's open collection hang in a quieter wing.

  • Local-first. Pictures are ordinary files on your device and in your own iCloud Drive. Nothing is uploaded to us, and the whole archive exports as a folder.
  • Family archive. Share a child through iCloud and grandparents see each new drawing arrive, and can add the ones made at their house.
  • Vaeda, the curator. On-device (Apple Foundation Models and Vision), he suggests titles and describes works. Nothing leaves the device.
  • Notes from Atelier. On the morning a drawing turns another year old, a note with its picture.
  • Search by words, or by colour.
  • iPhone, iPad and Mac, one purchase for all three.

How we built it

I planned the workflow and imagined how the rooms should feel, then made a web prototype with Claude Code (React and Three.js). Then we built the native app: SwiftUI, RealityKit for the rooms, CloudKit for the family archive, Vision and Foundation Models for Vaeda, RevenueCat for the one-time unlocks, and OneSignal for the notes that bring people back. The Mac app is the same app under Mac Catalyst.

Challenges we ran into

It's all in one app, designed for both family and professional use, which I haven't seen done before. Making 3D rooms feel as quick as a photo grid took a lot of work: a room is prepared in the background while you keep browsing, and an archive of thousands of works still scrolls smoothly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The rooms. I made a similar concept with Biblio.ink, but this time you can walk into the room. It's built with RealityKit, which we had to experiment with a lot.

What we learned

How to put 2D and 3D interfaces in one app, and make them feel like the same app.

What's next for Atelier: Family & Studio

More features for professional use, decorating a child's room, improving UX, and publishing a gallery to the web.

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