Tori Adams has always loved Los Angeles real estate. As a little girl growing up in Burbank, she remembers asking her mom to take her to open houses she’d find in the newspaper. She even has a tattoo of her childhood home, a one-story home with a flat midcentury roof in Burbank on the inside of her forearm. But as an adult, she found herself living in 12 spaces over 10 years, trying to find the perfect fit like a Los Angeles Goldilocks.
It started in college — she went to UCLA with a major in history — where it was commonplace to move every year. Then, once she graduated and began working as a writer and editor at publications including Flaunt, the Hollywood Reporter and Playboy, she flip-flopped between places, racking up nearly 20 roommates from Westwood to North Hollywood. At one point she lived with her sister, who is a fan of what Adams calls “millennial gray.”
By age 25, it became clear she needed to live alone. “I wanted to find something unique and charming that felt like a home,” she said.
Adams has lived in her freestanding one-bedroom, one-bathroom bungalow for more than two years, a personal record. The bungalow is outfitted with a dishwasher and washer and dryer; Adams pays $2,340 in rent including utilities. The unit, estimated at around 500 square feet, feels homey and is situated in the garden of a classic Spanish home occupied by her landlord. Adams never planned to live in Beverly Hills, a city that even as a fourth-generation Angeleno, she knows holds stereotypes for being for the uber-wealthy only.
In reality, she finds her rent fair for L.A. standards. The central location is convenient for her widespread friend group and she says she loves being able to walk to local businesses, including Lodge Bread Co., and to area pickleball and tennis courts.
The corner nook of Tori Adams’ kitchen is illuminated by a warm lamp.
A gallery wall decorates the bathroom in Adams’ home.
Adams, 30, needed help getting the bungalow up to her colorful, eccentric standards. She was busy starting her own business as an editorial consultant and working about 15 hours per month leading grief support groups as a volunteer for nonprofit Our House. She enlisted outside help in the form of an interior designer. But rather than spending tens of thousands furnishing and designing her space herself, she came across emerging interior designer Kiki Tolles through her TikTok algorithm.
Tolles, 24, positioned herself as an affordable and accessible option for renters, specializing in sourcing secondhand. Tolles, who was raised between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, is now studying commercial and residential interior design at KLC School of Design in London, working with clients remotely.
Tolles was initially drawn to a secondhand-centric design approach after seeing the level of furniture waste every year when students moved out of their dorms at USC and left IKEA pieces on the street as trash.
At the time Tolles and Adams connected, Tolles only had a few examples of past work, but Adams liked her style. The project was Tolles’ most involved to date. “She has amazing taste, and I also love that she’s self-taught. She’s doing this because she loves it. Plus, she has a truck,” Adams said. (The truck, a Chevy Suburban, is named Big Deborah.)
The dining table area in Adams’ space is decorated with an enchanted forest-themed wallpaper.
The living room of Adams’ home consists of bright velvet pieces, a mirrored side table and white drapes. A tray from Facebook Marketplace sits in the entryway. A chest of drawers in Adams’ bedroom. (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
To begin, Tolles conducted a survey to better understand Adams’ goals, asking about color palettes and historical eras. It wasn’t an easy answer for Adams, who doesn’t think her “whimsical and unique” style fits into certain design principles or time periods. They planned to tackle the living room, bedroom and bathroom with a goal of around $2,000 in furniture and supplies, allocating most of the budget to the living room. Both women had something to gain, Adams needed Tolles’ eye and labor, Tolles needed more case studies for her social media and business website. Tolles’ service fee, which has increased since her business has grown, ended up close to a $2,000 project rate.
The only piece of furniture that anchored the living room was a pink velour couch from Sunbeam Vintage in Highland Park. Before sourcing furniture, Tolles had her work cut out for her. The back wall of the living room was lined with baby blue shiplap that Adams couldn’t stand. So she created a painted wooden panel to cover the boards without damaging them.
She lined the back wall of the living room with a warm wooden midcentury cabinet, sourced on Facebook Marketplace, though it required a custom wooden top to be usable. On the wall opposite the garden windows, Adams initially wanted a mural, but she and Tolles decided on a sheet of wallpaper featuring an outdoor scene with a flying swallow — one of the only pieces of new materials used in the redecoration. It serves as a chic Zoom backdrop for Adams’ work-from-home setup, where Adams sits at a glossy black table on a built-in bench with pink and green cushions.
Tolles crafted bespoke window treatments from secondhand materials: linen-like Roman blinds in the kitchen, white linen drapes on top of woven bamboo blinds on the patio doors and velvet drapes in the bedroom.
Tori Adams and her cat Cami sit in her bedroom.
In the bedroom, rather than doing their best to brighten up the room, which is small and has only one window, Adams and Tolles leaned into the room’s cavernous energy and painted it dark blue. A double bed was pushed against a wall in the room to create a daybed. “It felt riskier, kind of rebellious to do that, but it ended up looking great and feeling really good too for her,” said Tolles about leaning into the room’s darkness. Adams found the dresser on the side of the road near her apartment.
She called Tolles, who promptly came to the rescue with her truck. The top of the dresser needed serious rehab: scrubbing, sanding and repainting to create a shiny finish. To finish off the room, on the primary wall of the bedroom, a Japanese-inspired vintage panel from Tolles’ own collection is framed as a piece of art.
In the bathroom, a chalkboard panel against the door invites visitors to vote for their favorite room via a tally system. (I added a tick for the bedroom, though the living room remains in the lead.) The bathroom isn’t as transformed as the rest of the space. With off-white paint job and the brown tiled floor the room came with, Tolles crafted a skirt for the sink out of striped black-and-white fabric to transform the pedestal design into something that allowed for more storage.
Throughout the rest of the house, including the open-plan kitchen and nooks and crannies across the living room, nearly every detail can be attributed to the women’s collaboration, from each vase or set of vintage glassware displayed down to the updated lighting fixtures. A few additions are purely Adams including some of the photos she took and had framed and a set of modern chrome cat bowls.
Adams’ cat Maci climbs out of the window into her catio.
About 2½ years later, Adams has no plans to leave. The only downsides she says are “the critters” (from ants and spiders to a rogue lizard that made its way in) that come with a building that’s over 70 years old.
Some of her family, lifelong Burbank residents, think her rent is extreme, but to her, it’s a price she’s happy to pay for her quality of life. Although homeownership is the goal for some of her 30-something peers, it isn’t on Adams’ shortlist of goals.
“The older I get, especially right now in this season of life, the less I need,” she said. “It feels really freeing.”
This story originally appeared on LA Times
