Studio MAK

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Commercial design is where we get to break our own rules a little.

No “timeless neutrals,” no playing it safe.

Station Lofts 118 | Chicago
See the full project at studiomak.co/commercial