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.

The brief was simple on paper: make it feel like a hotel. The kind you check into for one night and start mentally rearr...
06/10/2026

The brief was simple on paper: make it feel like a hotel. The kind you check into for one night and start mentally rearranging your real bedroom on the drive home. Easy to say, harder to land — hotel feel can tip into sterile fast if you’re not paying attention to every layer.
The Mila’s primary bedroom already had great architecture working for it — vaulted ceilings, hardwood, real scale — and the client wanted every surface inside it to feel as intentional as the shell. That’s the kind of brief we’d run toward every time.
So we wallpapered the ceiling so the vault stopped working alone. Paneled the walls. Brought in a Murano-style chandelier, a custom bed with a real silhouette, a sculptural bench, moody artwork. Hotel-grade layering without the airport-lounge chill. The kind of room you’d happily wake up in for the next twenty years.
This is why we do this. A client who’s all in, a home that earns the layering, and a brief specific enough to push against.
The Mila. 7,000 sq ft in Glenview. Full project on the site.

06/06/2026

All of these have happened, luckily not all at once, AND usually on a Friday afternoon. No project is perfect and we communicate that to our clients on day one, but some of these still come out of the blue and surprise us.

However, we love managing the curveballs because it means we’re on site with the trades and vendors, problem-solving in real time and quietly absorbing all the little things they’re experts at. We never stop being curious and learning from them (we know a thing or two as well though ;))

Our goal through it all is for these plot twists to get resolved before it ever reaches the client, unless absolutely necessary.

06/04/2026

There’s a contract and everything 🙂.
Mostly we just have good taste, stellar organization skills, and a few great trade recommendations.

She wanted a room she could close the door on and disappear into for ten hours. Moody, focused, hers.This is the part of...
06/02/2026

She wanted a room she could close the door on and disappear into for ten hours. Moody, focused, hers.

This is the part of the job we’d do for free (kidding, but the satisfaction is real). Translating a brief into a room is weeks of the good stuff — finish samples lined up on the desk for days, walking the space at different times of light, going back and forth on whether the wall should be one shade darker (it should).

Nobody sees that part. They see the room. But the room only feels this specific because the conversation behind it was that specific.

05/27/2026

Some people walk into a space with incredible bones and want to keep it light and airy. Others want it moody, layered, and a little dramatic.

This client wanted both, so we gave them two floors that feel like two completely different worlds.

Exposed brick, timber ceilings, a view of the Chicago River. We worked with every inch of it. Special finishes on the brick, layered lighting that makes the space feel alive at night, a staircase wall that actually stops you.

Moody and dark 🖤 or light and airy 🤍? Drop your preference in the comments.

05/26/2026

Brick stayed. Stair got darker. Dining room got fringe.
Every move had to honor the original and push it somewhere new.
The after is the easy part to look at. The process is where it actually got made.

We took the room from quiet-in-the-wrong-way to a place you’d actually want to spend a Sunday in. Dusty blue ceiling, so...
05/22/2026

We took the room from quiet-in-the-wrong-way to a place you’d actually want to spend a Sunday in. Dusty blue ceiling, soft landscape wallpaper, marble fireplace, a wing chair we’d fight you for.
Part of The Mila — full home in Glenview. 7,000 sq ft.
Full project on the site. Link in bio.

05/16/2026

Things we couldn’t touch on this Lincoln Park home office: the linoleum floors, the doors, the trim, the ceiling that’s pretty quirky, and a few mechanicals that weren’t going anywhere.

Pretty much everything else, we could get our hands on.

Our clients come to us and say that a room isn’t working, but they can’t pinpoint why. Our job is to figure that out and land on a version they wouldn’t have landed on themselves. We love projects like these because when we can’t blow it all up, we have to get smarter and more creative about every other move and that’s usually when a client realizes why they brought us in.

Sharing the vision for this one via our realistic renderings. This is one room of this whole home refresh, so follow along to see how this one comes together.

If your project lives somewhere between a refresh and a full gut, that’s our zone. The DMs are open 😉

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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