Where Work Meets Home

Alex & Evan, Breakfast for Dinner  ·  Chicago, IL  ·  2026 

THE STORY

Two Worlds, One Constant

Alex and Evan are photographers in Wicker Park, Chicago, and the married co-founders of Breakfast for Dinner, a studio built on poppy, surreal, slightly campy images that always seem to be telling a joke you almost catch. They shoot food and still life the way other people write short stories: there's a narrative in every frame, even if it's an inside joke that never makes the final cut.

Their apartment is their first real grown-up home. After years in an open-plan warehouse loft with no doors, no closets, and a kitchen tucked under the bedroom, they moved in about a year and a half ago to a place with actual rooms. "This is our first apartment that has doors and closets," Evan says. "And the kitchen isn't underneath the bedroom. I can't see the front door from the bed."

Life for a creative duo who live together and work together is, by design, a little unpredictable. Shoots run long. Ideas follow them home to the dinner table. A prop table can go from pristine to covered in honey and glitter in a single frame. Through all of it, one thing stays dependable: turn on the water, and it's there. We sat down with the two of them to talk through the home they're slowly making their own, the studio they built around the sink, and the constant that holds both together. 

DESIGN DECISIONS

Keeping the Good Bones

When they found the apartment, it was, by their own admission, pretty turnkey. "The whole place was kind of a gray box, and we haven't touched the walls yet," they say. It had been redone back in 2006 but still felt current. The one part that wasn't working was the kitchen, so that's where they focused. No range hood, no pantry, and a couple of water leaks in the very first week that meant redoing the floor right away. They added a range hood, changed the backsplash, and put in a new hands-free kitchen faucet, the Align MotionSense Wave Pre-Rinse Spring Touchless Kitchen Faucet, whose tall pro-style spring and wave sensor make quick work of a sink full of dishes.

The urgency was earned. Their last apartment had no range hood either, and the bedroom sat directly above the kitchen. "Everything was greasy all the time. We couldn't even see it because there was no light in there," they recall. "When we moved out, everything had this thick layer of grease and dust." Getting the kitchen right this time actually mattered.

What they loved most were the original details: the molding, the dining built-ins the whole room was centered around, and a green-tile bathroom with heated floors they have no plans to touch. "I didn't know I needed heated floors," Evan admits. "That's a really adult thing." The one thing that had to go was a set of pretty horrible bamboo window treatments, now replaced with green curtains that pick up the built-ins.

They didn't change much architecturally, but the space reads as unmistakably theirs. After a housewarming party, everyone said the same thing: it feels like your old place but grown up. "People were surprised how well our furniture fit. We have this giant couch, and we were shocked it worked in here." A giant couch, they'll tell you, is a vibe.

HOW THEY LIVE

A Calm Home, a Wilder Studio

If you know their work, the calm of the apartment is a surprise. That's the point. "This home is a bit of a break from our visual world," they say. "There are bits of our style peppered in, but the studio is way wilder."

Because they work together, they come home and end up talking about work, so they wanted as much distinction between the two as possible. The studio can be a loud, fun fantasy world, but home is something calmer, more muted, a little Zen. "We're both really visual people, so being in a different kind of space actually helps change our headspace."

The home is still a work in progress, and they're honest about the list: a custom hallway built-in for shoes and coats, an outdoor table for the balcony, and paint — always paint. "We keep meaning to go pick out swatches after work and never do." The whole place is basically one big room, so the plan is to break it up with color, section by section, the way they do in the studio. They've had a few friendly disagreements about the palette. Evan wants the kitchen red to match the fridge and the ceiling to match the green bathroom tile. "You're usually right," Alex says. "I just need to see it first."

THE STUDIO

The Louder Half

If the apartment is where they power down, the studio is where everything gets turned up. Plenty of the objects that now fill it used to live at home, repurposed into props. This is where their real style comes out.

"Poppy and surreal," is how they describe it. "We lean bright, though we go dramatic and dark sometimes too." Mostly they try to be a little campy, to tell a small, silly story inside a still image with props or toys they’ve often found. "We're always trying to put a hat on a hat. If it's funny, it could be funnier." There's usually a detail you might miss that they snuck in on purpose.

The two of them split the work in a way that just fits. Alex started in still life and loves tabletop styling and lighting — especially food styling. Evan came up shooting people and portraits and is the one directing. Doing both at once turned out to be the sweet spot. Alex is the messy one, always pushing for honey and syrups all over everything; Evan likes everything organized and put back nicely, so he's usually the one running props back and forth to clean them.

THE WORK

How Breakfast for Dinner Started

Breakfast for Dinner came together almost by accident. Alex and Evan met in 2017, discovered they were neighbors, and started passing jobs back and forth until they both went freelance and gave the partnership a name. Much of the early work happened during COVID, shot on the kitchen table of their old Pilsen loft, where hands-off clients let them turn the most boring briefs into something interesting. That stretch erased the line between home and work entirely, which is exactly why they wanted a studio of their own in the first place.

THE HEART OF IT ALL

Everything Runs Through the Kitchen Sink

Ask them how important water is to a shoot day and the answer is immediate: really, really important. "We always need to dump things: dump tanks, rinse and clean props, so having water and the kitchen at arm's length is essential to our workflow." A lot of their clients, especially early on, were food, which meant styling in the kitchen and cleaning up right after.

The work itself is messy by design. They're throwing sprinkles, splashing, tossing glitter. When you have to get a full slate of shots done in a day, cleanup between takes becomes one of the most important parts of the whole thing.

So, they built the studio around exactly that. Their old space wasn't suited for cleanup, so when they built this one, they put a kitchen sink close by and added a dishwasher. They also installed the Align MotionSense Wave touchless pulldown kitchen faucet, so a wave of a glitter- or honey-covered hand starts the water without leaving a sticky mess on the handle. One of the first things they did was get the floors as smooth as possible, because the old ones were gritty and impossible to keep clean. The studio kitchen doubles as a client lounge, but it's quietly taken over as a working kitchen because they use it constantly, and they even shoot against it. It has to be pretty and functional. They already have plans for more sinks on their kitchen remodel checklist. "We always wish we had more."

THE CONSTANT

The Thing You Never Think About

Two people, two visual worlds, and a home and studio that are both works in progress: swatches un-bought, sinks yet to be added, a kitchen someone still wants to paint red. That's the fun, unpredictable part. And neither of them would trade it.

The dependable part is quieter. It's the kitchen faucet that turns on for the first coffee of the day, and the one that rinses the glitter off a prop so the next shot can happen. Everything else on a shoot day is improvised: the props, the jokes, the hat on the hat. The water is the one thing they never have to think about.