Though based in southwest Michigan, most of Imparfait Design Studio’s projects are located in California, Florida, and Chicago. Led by husband-and-wife duo Rebekah Zaveloff and Nick Nichols, the firm is known for collected, character-driven interiors—and their Lakeside studio is a fitting reflection of that point of view.

“Lakeside, Michigan, is a small resort village 100 miles outside of Chicago,” Rebekah tells us. “You drive around the bottom of the lake and hit New Buffalo first, where the Amtrak stops, and then there are all these little towns with vacation homes and cottages as you head north up the coast about 20 miles.”

Their headquarters serves three purposes: a working studio, a material library, and a client-facing showroom. While artfully curated today, the space was far less inspiring when they first found it.

“Oh my god, it was awful,” Rebekah laughs. “It was basically a storage unit that used to be a realtor’s office: gray industrial carpet, 1990s sage green walls, and a dropped ceiling.” They completely gutted the space, exposing the ceiling rafters and painting everything white. “We also took down a wall, added French doors, put in a kitchenette, and built out the patio on the side with a pergola, shed, fence, and garden,” she recalls.

Now, the studio embodies the same sensibility as Imparfait’s interiors: collected, unhurried, and layered with vintage finds and material samples. “I love how the studio is a home for all this random stuff,” the designer notes. “Rugs, lighting, objects, things I collect for photoshoots or pieces that didn’t work on a project. It’s constantly changing.”

Nearly everything is vintage, save for the sofa from Rowe, with many of the studio’s pieces sourced through Chairish and 1stDibs. “I’ve always loved anything with age and character,” Rebekah shares. “But I also love contrasting modern art, lighting, and sculptural pieces.”

The studio may be thoughtfully composed, but the days spent there are anything but predictable. “There’s no such thing as typical,” Rebekah says of her workdays. “I often travel to the West Coast every week or every other week for jobsite visits. But if I’m not traveling, I work from home on Mondays with team meetings in the morning. Tuesdays are often a studio day, sometimes with one of my senior designers who lives in Michigan. The rest of the week I’m usually in the studio: OAC Zoom meetings, more team meetings, and lots of phone calls with our clients’ teams.”

For Rebekah, the varied schedule—and the ever-evolving studio that serves as its home base—is all in service of creating spaces people genuinely want to inhabit. “I love beautiful spaces and the feeling of being somewhere so welcoming and interesting that you don’t want to leave,” she says. “I want our clients’ homes to look like someone with really great taste did it on their own. Being able to create that for people is incredibly rewarding.”