About
Chapter 2 is a design studio in New York, and it grew out of set decoration: making a room feel like a real person lives there, on almost no budget. Not staged, not styled to death, just right. On a set you can't knock down a wall or wait six weeks for a sofa, so you learn to see what a room already has, what it's missing, and which three or four moves change everything. That's exactly what a New York apartment needs, especially one you rent.
Years in fashion editorial and style writing teach you something else: the difference between expensive and rich. A room can feel rich on very little if the proportions are right, the light is used, and the things in it belong. Which is why our work starts with your things. The chair you love, the lamp that came from your grandmother, the books you'll never get rid of. We're not here to replace your life with a catalog; we're here to edit, place, layer, and add the few key pieces that make the rest make sense. You'll have opinions. Good. We want them.
Underneath it is a habit: paying attention to how things actually get used. Where your keys land when you walk in. Which chair everyone ends up in. What has to work at seven in the morning and what only has to look good. We ask how a room will hold up, not just how it will photograph, so the spaces we design work the way you actually live in them.
We don't decorate around a trend. One room or the whole place, we start with what you already own and make the fewest moves that change how the space feels. A well-designed home should be easy to live in and beautiful to photograph, in that order.
Who you'll be working with
Bükre spent years as a fashion editor and style columnist for Milliyet and Hürriyet, two of Turkey's largest newspapers, and as a style consultant to people who wanted to look like themselves, only more so. Alongside that she designed and styled sets, where a room has to tell a story in a single frame and there's never enough money to do it the easy way. She's the reason our rooms feel like someone lives in them.
Saygun spent twenty years designing digital products and leading design teams, including at WordPress.com, and has taught design at the University of Pennsylvania. He's also a photographer and a filmmaker, which is where the habit of seeing a room as a frame, and asking what's in it and why, comes from. He's the reason our rooms work on a Tuesday morning, not just in a photo.
They live in Brooklyn, in a rental, with two kids and too many books.
Concept studies for each package, shown on plan: the before, the after, and the three or four moves in between.
The call, the visit, the moodboard, the prices, and the answers to the questions everyone asks.