00:00Hi, I'm Dani.
00:01Welcome to my sweet digs hidden in the jungle of green.
00:04Come check it out.
00:08I live in Beachwood Canyon in a two bedroom apartment.
00:11I live here with my boyfriend Fabio and my two dogs.
00:14It's about 900 square feet and for rent we pay $26.25.
00:18I think that $26.25 is, I don't want to say too little
00:21in case my landlord sees it.
00:23When you look at all of the other rents in our neighborhood,
00:25I feel like we plucked this sucker.
00:27This here's the dining room.
00:29The dining room, I really love.
00:31I love, love, love the chandelier.
00:33The picture behind me, I got at a thrift store for like 30 bucks.
00:37We both saw it at the same time and we kind of immediately
00:39were just like, yes, that's exactly what we need
00:41and that doesn't often happen.
00:42This room gets really great sun in the morning.
00:45It's really great to sit right here and catch the natural light
00:47and read the newspaper.
00:48I love the neighborhood where in Beachwood Canyon,
00:50it's kind of just at the beginning of the Hollywood Hills
00:52under the Hollywood sign.
00:53You're right in the middle of the city
00:54but you still feel kind of removed from it.
00:56It's super communal and I'm really into that.
00:59I found the apartment kind of by chance.
01:01I was actually interested in the apartment downstairs
01:03and when she finally did get back to us,
01:05she let me know that that apartment was already rented
01:07but that she had one that really wasn't on the market yet
01:10and we could take a look.
01:11It was bigger.
01:12It's on the second floor.
01:13I pulled the trigger right then and there.
01:14I was like, we're going to go for this apartment.
01:16It's perfect.
01:17And this is the kitchen.
01:18We cook a lot.
01:19We really love cooking.
01:20We do a lot of salmon and quinoa and bean-based things
01:24but I'm Italian and I love cheese and pasta
01:27so we also do a lot of that.
01:29The last apartment that Fabio and I had was a huge kitchen
01:33and I learned how to flambe in that kitchen
01:35so it was really cool but I know that if I tried to do that here,
01:38I would burn the whole apartment down.
01:41So this is the living room.
01:44Shake it out.
01:45My favorite thing about this space is my least favorite thing
01:48about this space and that's the jungle behind me.
01:50It really creates this sense of privacy and you feel like
01:54you're in this oasis rather than stuck in the middle
01:56of Hollywood Boulevard but also it sucks away all the sunlight
01:59so it's kind of a double-edged sword.
02:01Living so close to the Hollywood sign is really interesting.
02:04It's just like a fun fact when you're driving your relatives up
02:06or your friends from out of town, you're just like,
02:08and there's the Hollywood sign right in front of your face.
02:10It kind of makes you feel a little surreal,
02:12especially, you know, living in the East Coast your whole life
02:15and seeing the Hollywood sign and then seeing that you live right there.
02:19It's just, it's kind of a cool experience.
02:20But it's also a little frustrating because on the weekends,
02:26there's a slew of people just kind of standing in the middle of the road
02:29right where our carport is.
02:31They just take out their selfie sticks.
02:33I've seen people with tripods and they just stand there
02:36until they get their shot, cars be damned,
02:38and it's just like, okay, all right, that's what I deal with.
02:44This is the guest room.
02:46These are my dogs.
02:47This is Fred, short for Alfredo, and this is Noli, short for cannoli, cannoli ravioli.
02:53As you can see, they're pretty attached to me and where one goes,
02:56the other follows, as long as it's following me.
02:58We use this room as a guest room for whenever we have relatives
03:01or friends staying from out of town.
03:03We also read a lot in this room and we use it as a workout room as well.
03:07We're both from the East Coast, so we have guests coming all the time.
03:10My mom comes and stays with us and his family does too.
03:12In this corner, we have this kind of, it's like a vintage washing board that we found.
03:18Fabio's the one that found it and brought it into the apartment.
03:20And then I came home one day and he had swapped it out with a Jimi Hendrix poster.
03:24And it kind of started a battle and we like to pretend to go in there
03:27when no one's looking and swap it out.
03:30But I've hidden the Jimi Hendrix poster and it will not be coming back.
03:33I love to collect knickknacks.
03:35I also have some things that my grandfather left me when he passed away that I like to hang on
03:39to.
03:39One of those things is this really cool phone that I have over here that he used every single day.
03:44I remember being a kid and sitting in his little, like, side room where he always watched TV.
03:48He smoked his cigarettes and he'd always talk on this phone.
03:52And it was just something that I just remembered a lot as a kid.
03:55So it meant a lot when I got to take it.
03:58This is the bathroom.
03:59My biggest pet peeve about this apartment is that we don't have a lot of storage space.
04:02And one of the places we don't is the bathroom and the sink is a pedestal sink.
04:06I cheated.
04:07I went to Ikea and I got some corner bookshelves and I fused them together so that they are my
04:12under-sink storage.
04:16This is the bedroom.
04:17We originally didn't have a TV in the bedroom, but we do have a lot of guests stay in the
04:21guest room so the guests could kind of chill in the living room and we could do our own thing.
04:24The dresser was the splurge in our apartment.
04:26I thought it was such a cool piece.
04:28It's definitely unique.
04:29Nothing I've really ever seen before.
04:30We didn't have anything in the apartment at the time so we didn't really have to worry about matching it
04:34to anything.
04:35Fabio and I met at work a few years ago.
04:37We both worked at an advertising agency and we were both working on the same account together.
04:42We became friends for the first few years and we got really really close so after a few years of
04:47being friends we decided to date.
04:49Fabio and I are pretty great about splitting the space equally.
04:53He's really nice and let me keep the entire bedroom closet and dresser to myself and he uses the guest
04:59room dresser.
05:00Between Fabio and I we have a pretty similar aesthetic except for the fact that I like really bright bold
05:05colors and he's more of a neutral guy.
05:07So I think that the biggest challenge was really just kind of finding the right medium.
05:11In terms of what Fabio brings to the apartment, he is the lighting guy and he always hits the mood.
05:17He's very particular about like wattage for light bulbs.
05:21Every light bulb Fabio has picked out meticulously so it's really nice.
05:25It sets the apartment and gives it a good tone.
05:27My home style, I like casual, I like comfort but I like things to be clean too so we definitely
05:33have the mid-century modern vibe going on.
05:35This place felt like home really quickly.
05:39It really gives you this calming vibe and it makes you feel at home right away.
05:43When we started to get all of our things in here, we immediately just felt like a sigh of relief,
05:50like we were home.
