Low Cost DIYs Brought the Couple Behind @Cabagges’s Rental Apartment Kitchen to Life

When Anna Archibald and Kevin Serai—the food content creator couple known as Cabagges—met through a mutual friend in 2016 in New York City, they realized they had a few things in common: they’re both from Hawaii, half-Japanese, and worked in creative fields. When they began dating in 2021, they also discovered a shared love language of cooking. "Our first few dates, Anna came over [to my apartment in the Lower East Side] and I cooked for her, and then she cooked for me," says Serai. "Early on, we were making a lot of traditional Japanese food and some local Hawaii stuff. It was just us having fun, learning to make these dishes that we love or wanted to eat." 

TikTok was new at the time and cooking content hadn’t yet become ubiquitous, so posting videos to that platform felt relatively anonymous—except Archibald and Serai’s first post went viral. "We made mille-feuille nabe, a hot pot with cabbage and pork that’s layered and arranged. It’s very simple, but looks beautiful," says Archibald. (The name Cabagges is a slight nod to that dish.) Despite the unexpected social media engagement, the couple weren’t thinking about leaning into content creation at that point. They had separate careers—Archibald worked as a graphic designer, Serai in marketing for an eyewear brand—and were living in separate apartments, so they only posted occasionally.  

Their online presence ramped up when they moved in together in Williamsburg, and after they decided to give food content creation a go full-time. When they first toured their rental apartment two and a half years ago, it was far from their dream home, but in classic New York City fashion, they were desperate to find something and time was running out. "We were like, ‘Okay, nothing is looking better,’" Serai remembers when they settled on it, "but I think one thing we both appreciated about this place was that it didn’t have anything in it."

They’re not joking about the kitchen doing the very least. Instead of standard upper cabinet storage, there’s a built-in shelf that had gone through the deluxe landlord paint special, so much so that the doors wouldn’t close. A single exposed light bulb hung from the ceiling. A small, freestanding range stood by the room’s one window next to an old radiator. The thin sheet metal sink was rusted and bent. There were zero countertops—the previous tenant set up a small corner table meant to serve as a worktop.

"I think a lot of people would see all of this as a negative, but we were like, ‘At least we can do something with the space,’" says Serai. Archibald also adds that the features they did love about the kitchen were the original tile floor and the high ceilings. "Our search for an apartment was centered around a kitchen and this one was very bare, but we thought there was potential," she says.

Now going into their third year in the apartment, Serai and Archibald have turned their little kitchen that could into their favorite and most-used room. It’s not only where their cooking videos are staged, but their home office, where they develop recipes and design merch, too. Ahead, the couple chat through the affordable DIY projects—using materials and supplies mainly sourced at Home Depot, Lowe’s, or Ikea—that transformed their once sad-looking, empty kitchen into a cozy corner of the food-obsessed internet.