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Gil Melott Studio

@gilmelottstudio

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• interior design | creative direction
• AD . Elle Decor . Traditional Home . WSJ . NYtimes . Luxe . Galerie . Design Milk . Rue
•📍Chicago + NYC | TX

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There was a time when shelter magazines didn’t explain themselves. They didn’t care if you got it.

Rooms in the 1980s were allowed to be weird, personal, even a little hostile. You had to earn your way into them. They weren’t styled for approval—they were built around a life.

Then luxury got nervous.
Celebrity moved in.
And interiors started performing like movie stills instead of private spaces.

Lifestyle used to be the luxury.
Now luxury is a pose.

Design Alchemy isn’t interested in perfect rooms or polite taste. We’re interested in places with scars. With habits. With a point of view strong enough to survive being misunderstood.

If your house explains itself, it’s already lost. I’m not looking for a comeback of the 1980s — just some of the “be home by dark” energy.

FULL ESSAY on Substack.
Link in bio.

#DesignAlchemy #InteriorDesign #TasteOverTrends #DesignCulture #authenticity by @gilmelottstudio

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8 months ago

"Success comes on whether there are processes that I didn't design" 🎯

The paradox: build systems so good that your team doesn't need you to execute them.

@gilmelottstudio team delivered record-breaking work while he recovered from surgery.

🤝🤝🤝
‪Custom Leather Workshop @madebyalex‬
‪Showroom @johnpompstudios‬
‪Production @Gos4‬ by @gilmelottstudio

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a year ago

When @gilmelottstudio set out to build his design business, he knew the traditional way of doing things wouldn’t cut it.

“Within a year, I realized there was a better way to get it done - and Programa delivered on those things.”

Gil and his team run everything in one place - giving designers, clients, and collaborators a single source of truth.

This is just a glimpse into our upcoming feature with Gil Melott Studio. Stay tuned.

‪Collaborators‬
‪Custom Leather Workshop @madebyalex‬
‪Showroom @johnpompstudios‬ by @gilmelottstudio

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a year ago

DETRÁS DE LA BARRA

Most bars get designed like they’re afraid of the dark. Too many downlights, too much “vibe,” and every surface trying to be on camera.

These rooms commit. Lacquer, brick, velvet, one lamp, and the confidence to let the corners go black.

Mood board for a bar in the works. More shadow, less signage.

Images where known: Studio KO · David Kahn Architects + Fiona Banner · Oliver Gustav by @gilmelottstudio

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4 days ago

An upscale kitchen gets back about 36 cents on the dollar when you sell. In the houses I work in, the math only gets worse.

So stop spending like you’re selling. Fund the things you touch, sit in, and see by at night. Skip the badge on the fridge.

New on Design Alchemy. Link in

—gm|s by @gilmelottstudio

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6 days ago

When I get called to talk about designing a restaurant, I don’t start with the room.

I ask where they get their produce.

I ask what they cook for themselves when the restaurant is closed, nobody’s watching and there’s nothing to prove.

Then I ask to see their knives.

Not the new ones. The ones they reach for every night.

You learn a lot there.

What they care about. What they’ve kept. What gets better with use. Where the discipline is and where the bullshit starts.

By then, I usually know more about what the restaurant should feel like than I’d learn from a moodboard.

The people cooking the food should be in the room long before the designer is.

Then we can talk about the room.

—gm|s by @gilmelottstudio

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7 days ago

Kenzi Shiokava tended Hollywood gardens by day and spent the rest of his life carving telephone poles.

He did that for fifty years in Los Angeles: Chouinard, Otis, a long residency at Watts Towers, and art made from what everyone else had already thrown away. His first solo museum show opened five years after he died.

Standing in that room at the MCA, surrounded by charred totems that took decades to find their shape, my to-do list looked a little ridiculous.

He described the work as finding the “inner movement” of discarded things. It was slow and patient, closer to archaeology than to anything you’d call a process. You can’t get there by scrolling, sprinting, or answering email in under four minutes.

We all need to take a deep breath. Find the thing that resets your scale: a room like this one, a long lunch, a drive with the radio off. Then measure what actually matters against it.

That’s the only way our value can be of any value.

Go before January 31.

—gms taken in Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago by @gilmelottstudio

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11 days ago

You don’t know who he is. You watched anyway.

Smart gets you an opinion. Confident is free. An expert is a trail you can follow back to something that could have failed.

Four questions, ten seconds, and it works on anyone, including me.

This morning I watched a stranger explain why another stranger isn’t the best-dressed man in the world. I couldn’t tell you who crowned the first one or who the second one is, and I watched to the end.

New Design Alchemy essay link in the bio.

—xG by @gilmelottstudio

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15 days ago

Dopamine decor can’t tell the difference between more and too much.

This room can.

— gm|s. by @gilmelottstudio

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18 days ago

Fall ‘26. A Tear Sheet feature — the materials, vendors, and small businesses I can’t work without.

The list runs long after a decade: things that feel like history under your feet, tile that isn’t trying to be perfect, a sconce that understands masculine and feminine were never actually opposites.

That’s the whole practice, really — pieces with enough character to argue for themselves.

Featured in @ruemagazine , Fall 2026. On newsstands now.

—xG by @gilmelottstudio

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20 days ago

A cube doesn’t apologize for its corners.

Jorge Zalszupin built this one in 1960s Brazil — Warsaw-born architect, rosewood obsessive, a man who treated a joint line like a sentence. Jack Lenor Larsen dressed it — decades of chasing dye traditions from the Andes to Southeast Asia, then running them through a New York mill until they came out modern.

Two men, same decade, same instinct: take something inherited and make it argue with the room.

We call it the mood ring. It doesn’t match anything. It doesn’t try to. This is the chair for a brownstone parlor — martinis, gossip that runs long enough that nobody notices the chair started it.

—xG taken in New York City by @gilmelottstudio

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22 days ago

This kid pulled me away from my desk — away from a pile of fabrics that started to become the same shade of ochre no matter what light I put them in. The same pile I was confident about yesterday felt timid today.

But here we are. Outside. The bees are fighting over the last remnants of pollen on the flowers. There’s a green tree in full bloom, and one already fading. The skies are a familiar shade of first date blue — exciting, a bit tender, the kind of blue that means every word of it right now, and won’t remember saying any of it by October.

I would have missed it in my eight-inch stack of mohair had this rough-and-tumble shop dog not said, “Yo. Let’s take a break. Reset.”

He’s never once asked for a mood board.

—xG taken in Fulton Market, Chicago, Illinois by @gilmelottstudio

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24 days ago