Rental Revamp: Their L.A. Home Is a DIY Design Test Lab

Anyone who has navigated the rough seas of the Los Angeles rental market will tell you it requires grit, persistence, and more than a little imagination. Just ask Hannah Go and Rami Jrade. Between the two of them, the pair have lived in 13 different rentals around L.A. The units themselves? A mixed bag.

"We’ve lived in apartments with features that were just bonkers, like a new range that made it impossible to open the kitchen drawers, and refrigerators in odd locations," says Hannah, an L.A. native who designs spaces and products.

"I’ve slept in breakfast nooks...second living rooms," adds Rami, a songwriter and producer who moved to the city in 2004. "I was in a band, so it was typically a bunch of band guys getting creative with how many people we could have in a house to make rent."

Hannah shakes her head. "It’s a bummer that the market here is so competitive," she says. "It’s a fairly dehumanizing experience to have to queue up just to seek out something as necessary as housing. Rami and I had probably looked at upwards of 25 rentals over the course of a year. We’d walk into showings with a couple of other people touring the same rental and looking at the same can lights in the ceiling over and over and over again. No shade to the can light—they serve a purpose. But it’s unique to find a unit like this one."