In their Lake View apartment, Jim Wetzel and Lance Lawson mix clashing styles-and make it work. 

Though their store, SPACE 519, deals in prim modern housewares and clothing, life and business partners Lance Lawson and Jim Wetzel are masters of cacophony at home. Their newly renovated Lake View apartment is a whirl of contrasting styles carefully crafted into a balanced mosaic. As they prepare to open Space 519’s new Chestnut Street location this month, the couple walk us through their living room.

1. “Pick some themes and go with them,” says Lawson. Here, those include plants and animals (note the dog figurines atop the brass ram’s head coffee table).

2. The pair constantly add objects from estate sales and their travels. “It keeps the conversation evolving,” says Lawson. The circus of high and low combines midcentury tchotchkes like these ceramic horse and jockey bookends with wares from Target and Crate & Barrel. “The room is approachably formal,” says Lawson. “We use it, so it has to be comfortable.”

3. Lawson and Wetzel went for a “1950s country club chic” vibe that began with this vintage love seat upholstered with fabric depicting a British hunting scene. That cemented the palette for the room: red, green, and pink with flashes of ebony and brass.

4. “When you have a lot going on, you need to layer the whole room,” says Lawson. They threw a cheetah-print cowhide over their rug, paired an American shell-back chair from the ’40s with a Chinese garden stool, and matched the Mexican horse bookends with a stool upholstered in Tibetan fabric.

5. The Victorian mirror reflects Lake Michigan from the 14th floor, making the room look bigger. “There’s no TV, and that’s deliberate,” says Wetzel. Instead, the fireplace takes center stage at their cocktail parties.

By Heidi Mitchell