One peek inside wardrobe stylist and art director Morgan Jordan’s apartment in Glendale, and it’s clear she is not afraid of paint. “A lot of renters are,” Jordan says.
The apartment, which Jordan rents for $2,300 and found on Westside Rentals, already had character including a Spanish-style rounded entryway that goes from the living room to the dining room. It also met Jordan’s wish list of requirements: It has a bathtub and in-unit laundry and is on the first floor, making her loading and unloading of work supplies easier.
Living alone in Los Angeles for the first time, Jordan had visions of eclectic murals to match her vintage furniture and art collection.
The apartment marks the first time Jordan, who previously lived with roommates in Echo Park, has lived alone in Los Angeles. She had experience painting sets at work for the entertainment industry, but had never customized a rental of her own like this. Time, resources and/or a former roommate’s taste always got in the way.
Since her move in February 2025, she’s put her design philosophy that “any space can be brightened” to work. The result? A chic bohemian bungalow for her and her three-legged cat Zsa Zsa.
“My friends and I thought we could paint everything in one day. That did not happen,” she says, laughing.
About six months into living in the one-bedroom, she began painting. Her bedroom came first. “I just need color in my space,” she says. “I like a calming color that’s a little bit bolder.”
Her calming color of choice? An unexpected bold red with a contrasting strip of vibrant blue trim. It’s a callback to a mauve guest room in her childhood home with its unusual color that she always found peaceful.
Inside her bedroom, the rich red complements a wooden-and-woven bed frame found on Facebook Marketplace and textiles she’s collected from trips to Guatemala and Morocco. A blue rug calls back to the ceiling trim. A mirrored shelf procured at a Glassell Park estate sale for $80 hangs on the wall.
The most striking paint job in the apartment is in the dining room, a spacious area between the kitchen and living room. On the ceiling, a base of sage green is adorned with small stars. Jordan’s mural utilizes the flush mount dome in the center of the dining room ceiling as an Art Deco-inspired star motif, with painted white points extending from it for emphasis.
Despite her handiness and willingness to customize her space, Jordan is quick to identify her weak points: “I’m not an electrician, so any modifications with lights and wires have to be pretty simple” — hence making the most of the existing fixture. The ceiling mural is trimmed in baby pink, which builds upon pink details in paintings on surrounding walls.
The piece took Jordan two days and resulted in a neck ache. “I kind of like doing stuff myself,” she says.
And the room she likes the least? “My least favorite room in this whole apartment is the kitchen,” she says. She still isn’t a fan of the linoleum flooring or the brown painted cabinets. But she didn’t want to tackle sanding, disassembling and repainting the latter entirely. To make the cabinets her own, she took inspiration from Danish flower paintings and began hand-painting pink flowers against a white background on the fronts, allowing them to be bordered by the original brown.
“I started down there,” she says as she pointed to a less visible cabinet with a slightly more amateur paint job. Jordan sewed sage green curtains to conceal additional storage spaces and further brighten the space.
Jordan’s carefully cultivated space looks like the result of very intentional planning and list making.
The creative laughs at the thought. “I wish I could be that conscious and curate in that way, but no, I never do,” she says. “I just find stuff and see how to make space for it.”
Often this means employing a one-in, one-out rule, placing her in a near constant circle of life on Facebook Marketplace to avoid clutter. It also helps with her budget. “Because of the way I style stuff [in my photos], clean it and photograph it with good lighting, I’ve sold stuff for more than what I paid for,” she says of her Marketplace hustle.
Jordan’s work in film and television has her running around the city sourcing interesting objects, garments and more. She’s a big fan of EcoSet, a Glassell Park “green resource for people in the film industry to grab what they need from a selection of paint, props, backdrops and more.”
She also frequents Creature’s Plants & Coffee in Eagle Rock and Plant Material in Glassell Park for her ever-growing plant family. She rattles off stories behind objects in her space from various estate sales (her friend often works them and gives her a heads-up) and thrift stores including Out of the Closet.
Not every find has been an immediate hit. A seaglass chandelier sourced on a trip to Bali once drove a neighbor to complain. “They said it sounded like breaking glass, but I mean, it is glass,” Jordan says, laughing.
Now, thanks to a joint install with a friend, the light fixture hangs in the laundry area between the bedroom and bathroom, occasionally catching a cross breeze but mostly serving as decoration.
With nearly every surface painted to her liking, Jordan pictures herself staying in the apartment for a while.
She has a good relationship with her landlord, who “fixes things quickly and handles taking the trash bins out.” She feels comfortable getting home from jobs late at night.
She says her space is the perfect place for the “nesting period” of her life in which she fills the time she isn’t in hyper social on-set work mode with knitting, playing piano and dreaming up her next home project.
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