Gil Melott Studio is a Chicago-based luxury residential and boutique hospitality interior design practice, recognized by Architectural Digest, Elle Decor, WSJ Magazine, and NYT Styles. For a decade, principal Gil Melott has built authored interiors — homes shaped by vocal luxury, the deliberate layering of texture, era, and personal history, rather than the anonymous "quiet luxury" that dominates high-end design today. Serving Chicago, New York, and select national markets, with expanding reach in the Northeast.

Gil Melott has lived multiple lives — ranch hand, ad exec, restaurateur, interior designer.

Gil’s design instincts were formed long before his first client. He grew up working a family ranch in Texas, where scale, utility, and material honesty weren't aesthetic choices — they were how things stayed standing. That grounding shows up in every room he designs today: nothing performative, everything load-bearing.

His path to interiors ran through advertising and brand strategy, not design school. As an art director and later the founder of JACKarcher, a brand strategy consultancy acquired by Tribune Media Services in 2017, Melott spent over a decade learning how narrative, not just aesthetics, moves people. Operations and executive leadership roles at Cosi Inc. and Metromedia Restaurant Group sharpened a second instinct: that beautiful ideas only matter if they can actually be delivered, on budget, on time, at scale.

Gil Melott Studio, founded in 2016, is where those threads converge. Melott calls his point of view vocal luxury — interiors with the spine to look like they belong to someone, built on the conviction that homes should read as heritage, not performance. Every object is sourced, not chosen off a shelf; every room is layered with texture, era, and the kind of personal history that can't be manufactured on a deadline.

The studio's work has been recognized by Architectural Digest, Elle Decor, WSJ Magazine, NYT Styles, and Interior Design Magazine's Best of Year, with projects shown at Kips Bay and the Hamptons Designer Showhouse. Beyond residential and hospitality design, Melott writes Design Alchemy, an editorial platform on the industry's blind spots, and designs the LUZ lighting series and Bespoke Collections — extensions of the same belief that runs through all his work: a room should say something, and it should mean it.