♪♪
-Hi, I'm Rachel Martino. Welcome to my sweet digs.
Fun fact -- this building was built in 1901
and used to be a paint factory. Come on in.
♪♪
I live in a 2,000-square-foot loft,
and I absolutely love it.
So this is the loft, it's a really old building
and you have a ton of the original prewar details
like exposed pipes, exposed brick.
I'm paying $6,000 a month
to rent this apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
I absolutely love this area.
My favorite place to get coffee -- it's great.
There's actually a little coffee cart
right in McCarren Park next to the dog park.
And that's where I get, like, iced lattes in the morning
when I'm taking my dog to the dog park.
Dinner -- I love Café Mogador for Mediterranean food.
When I moved in, it was just a completely blank canvas,
but I wanted to create this very feminine, eclectic, and fun
but still really chic and glam,
and I worked with an incredible designer named Megan Hopp,
and we really saw eye-to-eye on so many things,
and this beautiful collaboration came together.
One of my favorite spaces is the dining area.
So, here in the dining space,
I was obsessed with the idea of doing something
that was kind of like a 1920s speakeasy.
So I actually did a wallpaper "final four" on my Instagram
so my followers could pick which wallpaper they liked the best.
It was really fun.
And this one was by far the most popular,
and it was my favorite, as well,
and I absolutely love the motifs.
One of the things when I moved in, I was like --
there's this crazy long mirror, but I did want to keep it
because I love the history of the space.
One of the biggest splurges in this space
was this gorgeous 11-foot dining table,
and I love that I added these rainbow velvet chairs.
Those were also a big struggle
to find all the colors that I wanted.
I love it.
The bar was also an amazing project
that I obviously loved working on.
I knew I wanted to work with a designer called Soil & Oak
that's based here in New York.
They've been on my Pinterest board since like 2015,
and I was excited to work with them,
and I love following them on Instagram
because they always have the most amazing
setups of these gorgeous bars or shelves
in New York apartments.
I feel like I've been pretty lucky with this space.
We haven't had too many things go wrong,
but I will say, when we had the bar glass
come in for the home bar, even just looking at it,
it's like this thick, and immediately I was like,
"I do not know if the wall is strong enough for that."
But, fortunately, we were able to find a solution
just adding, like, basically adding another layer of wall
so that there was enough for the shelves
to kind of grab on to.
Here is the living-room area.
We picked this pink curved sofa sectional
in this kind of blush pink velvet,
which I absolutely love.
It really helps define the space,
but it's really inviting, I think.
Right when you come in,
you see this gorgeous "U"-shaped couch,
and you just want to sit and relax and enjoy the space.
The kitchen is right here.
This is sort of the heart of the home,
and it's where everybody ends up
coming to sit when they come over.
I was lucky. It was actually newly renovated
before I moved in, so it's pretty much
almost exactly what -- what I saw
when I saw the place for the first time.
So, these actually used to be windows,
but they were covered up at some point
due to air rights -- very common in New York.
But I actually love the exposed brick,
and the entire place has a really cool,
old-world New York industrial vibe,
which was what really drew me to it.
But I wanted to create my own feminine flair to it.
This area is another one of my favorite areas of the space.
It's -- I-I call it, like, the reading nook.
Um, it's another living space, and you have these gorgeous,
big, oversized windows with this beautiful, exposed brick.
I love the pop of yellow with this cute little couch
and I've always wanted a swing chair.
And this one, I think, is so cute.
Everybody always wants to come and sit on it,
and you can sit on it.
It's safe.
I don't know what it is, but my whole life
I've always wanted a swinging chair.
Whenever I see it in decor or at studios or anywhere,
I just think it looks like so much fun.
So I really wanted to incorporate a hanging chair,
and this one, I think, is really chic.
And it's just one of those things
that, no matter who comes in the space,
they're going to end up sitting on the swing chair.
This is my favorite spot to relax in the apartment,
and it's also Taxi's favorite spot.
This is my 1-year-old cockapoo,
but he's always curled up on this couch.
And right off of this area is the bedroom.
It's actually a really cute, cozy bedroom.
It's not very big, um, but it gets a ton of gorgeous light,
and I absolutely love the white exposed brick.
So the bedroom was the one space
I wanted to keep more neutral and not do a ton of color.
So, as you can see, it's mostly neutral and white,
and, as you can see, it has these radiator covers
that span the entire length of the wall.
It's, like, kind of a built-in shelf.
Plus, it keeps it warm in the winter.
I'm excited to show you my favorite piece
of the apartment,
and it is a 400-square-foot studio in the apartment.
I myself have been a content creator for over 10 years,
and it's always been my dream to have, like, a studio.
What I love most about having a production studio in the space
is just meeting new people.
I really love having people come through the space,
seeing what kind of unique projects
that they're working on,
and they've been so many different types of projects.
And because it's so feminine,
we have a lot of female-focused projects,
which, of course, is near and dear to my heart.
So, first, I started with the bookcases
these I absolutely love, and I love the color.
It's this rich, beautiful terra-cotta,
and I get to style it
with all my favorite little trinkets, my books.
And it's fun because I can always restyle it
depending on my mood
or depending on what kind of photo shoot I'm doing.
This is definitely the most photographed space in the house.
When people come to take photos, they always want to get a photo
in front of the pink bookshelves.
This area over here is this, like, very glam vanity station.
I actually get ready here myself every day,
but it's also available to people who rent the studio.
What's my favorite part about the home?
I just love everything about it.
It's hard to pick one specific thing.
I definitely love how open it is.
For me, because we decided to rent it as a production studio,
it has tons of space for people to come and enjoy,
to take photos, create videos,
and that's really what drew me to it in the first place
was just how open it was,
and you can really accommodate a lot of people here.
My least favorite thing about this space
is that it doesn't have an outdoor area,
but we are really close to a really beautiful park
called McCarren Park, so it's okay,
but I do miss having an outdoor area.
The space is always evolving.
I always want to try and incorporate new things,
but, overall, I feel like I'm actually finished
with the design, which makes me really happy.
So it's more of a matter
of changing up things for the seasons.
Fortunately, there's no other big projects,
but you never know I could change my mind tomorrow.
That's what's great is, you know,
if you want to try something different, you can.