Have you taken on an ambitious Rental Revamp—or do you know someone who has? We want to hear about it! Reach out to edit@dwell.com with photos and a brief description to submit a project.

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.”

The newly built, two-bedroom, one-bath ADU in Northeast L.A.’s Cypress Park neighborhood popped up on Zillow around Christmas. “L.A. was dead, and nobody else was here yet," Rami recalls. “Had it been a different month, maybe more people would have been looking.”

“Hot tip,” he notes with a laugh. “Do your search around the holidays—timing is everything.”

The ADU forms one side of a duplex—featured in Dwell’s September/October 2025 issue—designed and built by architect-owner Hunter Knight, founder of the L.A. firm Weather Projects. Featuring details like peaked, exposed wood ceilings, leathered granite counters, a skylit open-plan common space and a private patio, it was unlike anything they’d seen during their search. And the stained concrete floors were ideal for the couple’s two cats.

“We walked in and fell in love,” says Hannah, “It was a jaw-dropper, basically. I looked around, and it was like, ‘Holy cow!’ Hunter has given the place a textural materiality, and the vaulted ceilings have a beautiful tone. Yes, there are white walls, but there’s a visual rhythm that you don’t really get in a white-walled box.”

Rami remembers the moment. “After Hannah had checked out the other rooms, she did a 180 in the living room with a little grin on her face. She looked at me and said, ‘No notes.’ So I was like, ‘I guess we’re moving!’”

Though Hunter had finished the interior, Hannah knew it would give her the opportunity to exercise her talents for decor and layout. “Because I have a background in fabrication and furniture design, I’ve fine-tuned a lot of the elements so that they feel sort of built in,” she says.

The second bedroom, which she and Rami use as a shared office, is one example. Reusing the plywood-topped desk she’d made for their previous apartment, Hannah took a circular saw and cut it down to size to fit the ADU.

She also regularly rotates their collection of artworks and decorative pieces and experiments with modular pieces, such as the Ikea sofa in the living area and the credenza just behind it. “The benefit of buying modular furniture as a renter is that you can reduce or increase those modules when you move, or when you want to change the effect of the assemblage of parts,” she says.

“Because we don’t know how long we’ll be here—even though we’re hoping it’s a very long time—it’s important for me to envision another life for things so I’m not constantly having to buy site-specific furniture. I want to invest in things that I’ll have for a really long time that can serve multiple purposes.”

She also likes playing with room layouts. “I’ll give Rami this look on a Sunday morning, like, ‘We’re about to move every single piece of furniture around in this room right now.’”

Rami smiles. “If Hannah is standing in a corner squinting her eyes with her hands on her chin, I know it’s going down—and I’m going to have to move some heavy furniture.

“But Hannah and Hunter have done such a wonderful job making this an incredible space,” he adds. “It just feels like home.”

Hannah and Rami had grown accustomed to renting a new apartment every year—every time their leases were up. “But the bar is quite high now,” she says. “Beyond the beautiful building and the beautiful space that Hunter has created, we live in a really beautiful community. It feels good to have the opportunity to create and lay down some roots without having to buy a home.”

—

Read more about the Amabel Street Duplex in the September/October 2025 issue.

More Rental Revamp stories:

A Berlin Designer Pieces Together His Own Italo-Disco Paradise

Kim Swift’s Surreal Silver Lake Home Will Tempt You to Paint Everything

How a Creator Found a Flat in London’s Tight Housing Market—and Made It Her Own

Project Credits:

Architect of Record & Builder: Weather Projects / @weather_projects

Interior Design: @studiohanego

Structural Engineering: Offset Engineering