Rental Revamp: How Two Budding Besties Built a Full-On Addition to Their L.A. Home

Just a day after they met for the first time, movement artist Cami Árboles and jewelry designer Raquel "Rockii" Navarro put down a deposit on a Silver Lake rental that would change their lives.

It all began in the middle of the pandemic. Cami had just started house hunting when she saw a For Lease sign in front of a three-bedroom midcentury she walked by every day. She stepped right in—the door was unlocked—and quickly realized that it was the one. The 1,605-square-foot home had a cozy living room with a curvy, cased opening that led to the dining room, kitchen, two bedrooms, and backyard—but the real clincher was a secret door in the living area that opened to a spiral staircase and a downstairs atrium with a third bedroom.

"I needed tall ceilings so that I could put a hole [for a dancing pole] in the house," explains Cami, who founded the movement studio MBS Collective in the summer of 2020. "Luckily, the entire bottom floor of the house has ten-foot ceilings—the second I saw that, I immediately thought, Oh my God, I need to live here."

The same day Cami viewed the home, she met Rockii. The two had been chatting via DMs for a while—Cami is an avid customer of Rockii’s brand, Rockii Studios, which offers molten jewelry crafted from silver clay, stones, minerals, and handmade beads—so they planned to hang out at the home Cami shared with Shiloh Enoki, who owns a teahouse in L.A.