Guide

What TEI Canvas is

A design console and an MCP toolset over one shared bathroom-design engine.

Overview

TEI Canvas is an interior-design studio for bathrooms. You lay out a room to scale, place sanitaryware from a catalogue, and check the result against the practice's own clearance and layout rules.

There are two ways in, and they sit on the same foundation:

  • The console is this app: the plans list, the 2D and 3D editor, the inventory catalogue, and the rules.
  • The MCP toolset exposes the same operations to an external assistant, so a chat agent can read and edit the very rooms you see here.

One typed engine underneath

Everything rests on a single scene engine. A room is a typed scene document: a schema-first, normalised graph of the room shell, the fixtures in it, and their properties. It is validated on the way in, so a malformed scene never loads.

Geometry is derived from that document, never stored alongside it. The 2D plan and the 3D stage are two views of the same derived scene, so they can never drift apart. This is why the app can offer the same editing power to a person clicking in the canvas and to an assistant calling a tool.

The same tools, in the app and over MCP

The operations that change a scene are defined once, as engine commands. The console runs them when you drag a bath or edit a field; an assistant runs the identical commands over MCP.

The practical upshot: an external assistant is not driving a screen or guessing at pixels. It holds the same typed handles you do, so what it can do and what you can do are the same set. A change made either way lands in the same place and shows up on the other side.