The effects of using affordable housing has been the concerning focus of citizen,government and designer.Chinas aging population is increasing significantly today.About the future development of affordable housing,more attention will be inevitably paid to the elder groups.Taking the model room of Guangzhou affordable housing as sample,this paper makes a study on the preference in space decoration with image simulation method.Research procedureis as follows:Firstly,After collecting information and images of indoor decoration of affordable housing in Guangzhou,current status points of affordable housing decoration were summarized.Based on these,a digital modeling and rendering the unified picture of the main rooms were conducted.Secondly,a fivegrade Likert scale was used to design questionnaire.The room size,daylighting,color,fumishings,floor materials,windows and others factors were extracted out as variables.Besides these,there is the comments field reserved for the households.Thirdly,two samples houses which the decoration was in accordance with the simulated picture were got.They were two community of Wansong-Park and AnxiaGarden.Then an interviews was conducted in the elderly population who live in the housing estates of these two communities.The result was compared with that of the retired faculties of South China University of Technology.Finally,analysis of collected data.The analysis of mean value shows that living rooms evaluation is better than that of bedroom and kitchen,but the subjective evaluation of the living rooms floor materials is relatively low.However,bedrooms color,daylighting is got more better evaluation,and the evaluation of the kitchen size is the lowest,and toilet got too low concern to it.By Using Mann-Whitney U test,the evaluation differences between the two groups of variables are mainly concentrated in the indicators of living room,which may be that retired facultys living room mostly experienced re-decoration.And various environmental factors the faculties selected have a significant difference from that of social housing tenants.Other overall difference on the bedroom or kitchen elements is not obvious.Therefore,it is considered subjective evaluations of most variables are e in the same trends between the two target groups.By analyzing Spearmans rho correlation coefficients,it revealed the elderly groupspreference of significant are color contrast,uniform and reasonable furniture design,bright light colored wall,warmer wood and other materials floor tiles etc.