A Look Into My Past...

There is something that feels so good about decorating a place that is your own. I’ve lived in countless apartments over the years, and before I share my recent creative process, I want to give a little background to why this has been so exciting for me.  When I was modeling and living in New York and Miami, I mainly lived in “Model Apartments.”  For those of you who have not had the pleasure to experience them, these can be less than stellar places.  Sorry Tyra, but the ones on America’s Next Top Model do not mirror reality.  Girls pay their agencies by the week to live in them for much cheaper than you could get anywhere else in the metropolitan cities, but the catch is the agencies can stick in as many girls as they can provide beds (and sometimes there’s additional overflow). An average of six teenage-ish models from all over the world living in a crampted apartment does not equal clean, beautiful living. 

Picture a one bedroom Miami apartment—the building is tall and white with its name posted down the front, but one of the letters has fallen off over the years and a dirty silhouette remains in its place. 

Two sets of bunkbeds chill in the one bedroom with stained concrete floors and large Florida bugs that bravely strut around the room (like your roommates practicing their runway walks).  Suitcases are strewn around the room, with shoes, clothes, and hair products vomited about. Move into the living room and you witness the luxury linoleum floor, mismatched furniture (the pleather of a chair repaired with duct tape in several places) and another set of bunk beds in the corner.  Girls try to spruce it up with personalizations like fashion pages on the walls, comp cards, and a chandelier (with broken bulbs), but bunkbeds in the living room need a bit more help than the pages of Vogue and Glamour. 

Miami living room lookin' good after a thorough scrub-down.

Halloween in the living room

suitcase suitcase everywhere

Jet up to New York City, which is truly the city of dreams, but unfortunately very small rooms.  And in model apartments…more bunkbeds.  Two of my different rooms in NYC were barely bigger than the bed itself.  Cockroaches, mice, and fruit flies commonly came for visits.  One time Louie the mouse chewed a hole through an entire loaf of one of my (five) roommate’s bread.  (When she called to report the vermin, the agency was more concerned as to why she was eating bread.) Oh yes, and more bunkbeds and suitcases in the living room. Sure we did things to make the place our own..adding curtains to blindless windows, flowers to spruce up the bad paint jobs, flowers and candles to improve the smells; in one place I hung a beach towel on the wall as a decorative solution over a hole that an angry roommate made after punching the wall after speaking to a cheating boyfriend a thousand miles away.  Granted we also didn’t spend much time in these apartments, as the city itself was our beautiful playground.

View into the living room from the kitchen (spot the bunkbeds?)

Although I do miss those gorgeous, exciting cities, I do not miss the rough and exhausted model apartments, and getting to decorate and outfit my very own place has been a constant source of excitement and pride. Some nights when I would lay in my bunkbed, I would think about this imaginary place in my head that I would one day own and all of the things I would one day do to make it feel like mine...  More to come soon on the beginning of that exciting process that has now finally come into fruition.

I added pretty curtains to this NY bedroom.. Hop enjoyed them.

...and bunkbeds.