Though photographer Meghan Marin and designer Parker Limón have different personal styles, they agree on how to furnish their Brooklyn apartment: by stooping and Craigslisting and eBaying as much as possible. “We are definitely those types of people who won’t pay full price for anything,” Parker admits. “We’ll hunt for it until we find something that we like, or we’ll have our eyes on something for years until we find it used. So it’s taken us a while to get here, but it feels really good because we put in the time.”

The result of the couple’s meticulous, budget-minded sourcing method is an intentional collection of vintage and secondhand gems that brings life to their 1,800-square-foot two-bedroom rental in a 1899 Bed-Stuy brownstone. Meghan’s eclectic family heirlooms and DIY projects mix with Parker’s beloved 1960s Italian and Bauhaus treasures for an idiosyncratic aesthetic that somehow just works.

In the living room, a colorful IKEA rug is paired with a camel leather Article sofa from Craigslist. “Whenever we have friends over, it’s never four—it’s always like 15, so we wanted a nice long couch that would fit as many people as we possibly could,” explains Parker. “This is the maximum size you can fit against this wall and still have a lighting fixture and some plants on the side. It’s the centerpiece of the room.”

Other seating options include a Marcel Breuer tubular steel Wassily chair that an eBay seller kindly biked over from Astoria and an LC2 Petit Modele armchair whose frame the couple inherited from a friend who was moving. The empty frame sat in the apartment for months before Parker found an artisan to craft custom white pleather cushions. “The only seller I could find does marine vinyl custom boat seats, so I got in touch with them,” he says. “We had these made and they just shipped them to us from San Francisco.”

The adjacent dining area features a vegetable-covered hutch from Meghan’s childhood home, a framed silk scarf that belonged to her grandmother, and a set of cherry dining chairs that she refurbished by hand. “A furniture factory in my hometown shut down a couple years ago, and they were doing a big sale,” she remembers. “I got these chairs [for about $40]…and I refinished, sanded, oiled, and redid the webbing. It’s nice to put the TLC back into the stuff that we have.”

The primary bedroom is small and cozy, with a simple Home Depot bed frame, a mattress Meghan snagged from a staged home she photographed, and earth-toned French flax linens from Bed Threads. Meghan and Parker styled the original mantle with special objects like a circular mirror, candles, a basket purse, and an ikebana book from a flea market in Wilmington, Vermont. “It’s just a lot of knickknacks,” she says. “We are very good at collecting a rock or a seashell or just picking up little things here and there.”

The couple use their second bedroom as an office, so they built a long double desk with an IKEA butcher block and powder-coated steel legs. The workspace also includes a drafting table for messy projects and two tall bookcases where they store Meghan’s film negative archives, her photography equipment, Parker’s architecture school models, and, of course, lots of books. Filled with their past creations, it’s the place where the two creatives can continue making new work.