Studio MAK

Studio MAK Chicago’s Luxury Design Experts
Where Business and Creativity Align We make design approachable, interpretable, collaborative, and exhilarating!

Our diverse skill sets stem from years of experience in residential and commercial real estate. As the residential and hospitality worlds continue to collide, we strive to create environments that combine the vibrant and cutting-edge feel of the hotel and restaurant world with the serenity and function of home life. Our clients become our partners throughout the process, and what we create is inspired by their stories, desires, and needs.

08/14/2026

Milwaukee, first look 👀

We’re stepping into a century-old church that’s being reimagined as apartments — and we’re designing the amenity spaces that’ll carry it into its next chapter. The bones are incredible: original stained glass, soaring ceilings, all that light.

Adaptive reuse means figuring out how to honor what’s already there while making the building work for how people actually want to live now.

More walkthroughs as this one comes together. Follow along.

08/11/2026

If you think interior design is all about picking pretty things...trust us, we thought that too when we started this whole thing. Boy, were we in for a humbling lesson. 😂 The actual “pretty stuff” is maybe 25% of the job-if that. Most days are paperwork, managing people (lots of people who don’t particularly want to be managed 😂), budgets, spreadsheets, and learning. Constantly. One day we’re talking to a general contractor, the next we’re deep in the weeds with the team building your kitchen, fabricating your drapery, coordinating specialty trades, or figuring out something we’ve never encountered before. That’s honestly one of the things we love most about this industry-you’re never done learning.

So no... there’s not a whole lot of glamour behind the scenes. Everyone saves the glam for the gram 😜

07/30/2026

If you think design is picking pretty things, we have news. It’s this: a laptop, a plan that’s been opened and closed a hundred times, and a coffee that’s gone cold twice. The glamorous part comes later. This is the part that makes the glamorous part possible.

07/27/2026

New project in West Loop, and this is where it began.

A visioning session is step one — before any drawings, before any sourcing. It’s us and the client in a room with every reference image, every “maybe this” and “definitely not that,” getting pulled up on screen at once. We talk through what feels right, what feels off, and what we’re building toward. Less brainstorm, more decision-making. By the end, we’re not just inspired — we have direction.

The Mila. Before and after.Mural by Susan Harter Muralpapers Glenview, Illinois. Full design service.
07/23/2026

The Mila. Before and after.
Mural by Susan Harter Muralpapers
Glenview, Illinois. Full design service.

07/21/2026

New project, new building, empty rooms doing their best impression of a blank canvas. Give us a few weeks.

07/16/2026

Half of this job is knowing your materials better than anyone expects you to.

Grateful to Elm Surfaces for walking us and our partners through Seranova this week. This is the unglamorous, essential part of the work — staying curious, keeping our sourcing sharp, learning from the people who know a material better than anyone. This is where the good work actually begins.

07/13/2026

Managing a renovation looks simple from the outside, and we get why people want to try — it’s your home, your money, your vision. But the part we quietly love is everything that happens off the mood board: the site visits, the email chain that never sleeps, the vendor who discontinues your tile mid-install, the dozen little curveballs a week. We don’t just tolerate that chaos. It’s the reason we do this. Problem-solving on site with the trades, learning something new from them every single week, catching the plot twist before it ever reaches you — that’s the job we fell for.

07/08/2026

People assume the design fee is where the money goes. In reality, it’s where the money stops leaking — and most of it happens before finishes ever enter the conversation.

Here’s where we actually save it:

— Walls come down, we’re there — because a load-bearing surprise caught on day one is a conversation; caught on day thirty is a redesign
— Rough-in gets checked against our layout, not the trade’s best guess, since moving a drain after drywall costs multiples of moving it before
— Framing gets measured before it’s trusted — an inch off throws out every cabinet and countertop spec downstream

On the design side:
— Vendor pricing our clients never see on their own, applied to every order — not just the ones that make it into a photo
— Materials chosen for what they look like in year three, not just week one
— Lead times tracked closely enough that nothing gets ordered twice out of panic.

None of this ends up in a final photo. It’s not the part anyone asks about. But it’s the difference between a budget that disappears into corrections and one that actually ends up on the walls.

07/07/2026

A staircase is just a hallway that goes up. So we ran two stories of light straight down the middle of it — and now it’s the first thing people comment on when they walk in.


Address

1038 N Ashland Avenue
Chicago, IL
60622

Opening Hours

Monday 9am - 6pm
Tuesday 9am - 6pm
Wednesday 9am - 6pm
Thursday 9am - 6pm
Friday 9am - 6pm

Telephone

+16305890220

Website

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