Natalie Wong’s Hollywood Regency Home Serves 'Champagne Lifestyle on a Beer Budget' in Los Angeles

Like a starlet-to-be who stumbles into a talent scout, Natalie Wong was just doing her thing when the DIY-out-loud life came for her. “I work in operations for a global entertainment and media company,” she explains. "My role is very task-oriented and I work with engineers and developers; my background actually is marketing and event production.”

Her two-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles’s Koreatown was constructed more than 90 years ago, when the city was in the process of an aesthetic shift. “The building was built in the mid-1930s and it’s French Normandy style,” Natalie says. “With Hollywood Regency kind of starting in the ‘30s, I completely pivoted and decided to go [with] Hollywood Regency [decor]. I wanted to recapture that old Hollywood retro glam style, especially since it was built in that era. I just totally am into that whole historic side of things.” Read on to see how she transformed her spaces — and how they turned her into “an accidental content creator.”

“This is the love-at first-sight room,” Natalie says. “I stepped into this space and immediately knew I needed to live here: The 10-foot ceilings, the original crown molding, the original hardwood floors, this fireplace mantel is original! Just these little architectural elements that you don’t find in new spaces.”

The fact that Natalie casts an extremely wide net for her vintage treasures means that her apartment features decor from all over the world — and that she sometimes has to pay a premium to bring it home. “[This] chandelier was actually an eBay find, so I think shipping it was more than the actual chandelier,” she says.

Natalie layers the wall art throughout her home by intermingling paintings, prints and black-and-white photographs like this one, Peter Ruck’s 1968 portrait of Roger Moore, who would become James Bond in movie palaces around the world five years later.

There’s an unexpectedly contemporary Hollywood connection to Natalie’s living room beverage station: “The bar cart came from the estate of David Arquette, randomly! It needs some repair work — but, you know, I just cover it with a lot of alcohol,” she says. That’s the DIY spirit! The cheeky "PRESS FOR CHAMPAGNE" button mounted on the wall behind the cart is, alas, non-functional. “I wish champagne would magically appear, but nothing actually happens. I have to bring my own champagne.”

Natalie loves all of her vintage pieces, of course, but there’s something extra-special about the earliest discoveries — like this spectacular coffee table, which came into her life in 2016. “This was one of my first flea market finds from the Rose Bowl. I remember schlepping it from the seller’s booth to the exit in the July heat with sweat running down my back after spending hours hunting for treasures with my bestie,” she posted on Instagram.

The dining room’s sculptural, glass-topped centerpiece is a vintage find that turned into a multigenerational effort. “The dining table is an Arthur Court-style dining table,” she says. “I found it on Facebook Marketplace when I was up in the Bay Area with my parents, bought it from a guy — much to my mom’s annoyance — and then convinced my parents to drive it down on one of their visits about a month later.”

Natalie’s cross-back Chinoiserie dining chairs are another group project. “In here I really wanted to incorporate a lot of blue elements, so I had my friend Julie help me reupholster the dining chairs,” she explains. “We bought fabric from the fabric district [a hundred-block swath of downtown L.A. with more than 4,000 retail and wholesale fabric and notions sellers], and then we got the cushions to reupholster with the fabric we bought. I have amazing friends!”

"During the pandemic [the dining room] became kind of my Zoom background,” Natalie says. “I stenciled the walls because the walls are textured, and I’ve been told, ‘don’t wallpaper over textured walls, you need to skim coat!’ I didn’t want any of that, so I decided to stencil [and paint] instead.” The delicate midtone blue she chose for the walls’ base is Sherwin-Williams’ French Moire; the ceiling is Sherwin-Williams’ Little Boy Blu.

With glass doors and exteriors painted a crisp, contrasting black, the built-in cabinets in Natalie’s dining room are meant to draw the eye. Accordingly, their contents are ready for prime time: She’s collected rocks glasses, tumblers, Moroccan tea glasses and coupes with filigreed details to delight visitors.

The thoughtfully layered vignette beside the window in Natalie’s dining room is a design moment for all seasons, thanks to her deployment of silk blooms and faux fronds. A massive, playful character vase from Jonathan Adler’s Utopia collection doubles as a bust with a crown of flowers, and a pair of vintage quails extend her brass menagerie.

In lieu of a runner, Natalie used the same crisp paint (Sherwin-Williams’ Tricorn Black) that details her interior doors to give her stairs a pop of graphic contrast. This flight doesn’t get as much wear and tear as it once did: “I don’t wear shoes anymore since the pandemic,” she says. “Shoe-optional in this household!”

Natalie’s bedroom is “enormous for one person, I know. [I’ve] kind of segmented the room into different little areas,” she says. Outfitted with a canny combination of vintage finds and contemporary bargains, this space delivers high-end luxury at occasionally mind-boggling price points. Her pitch-perfect vintage glass palm chandelier, for example, was $85 — and $80 of that was what she paid for its installation.

“[I] have the fireplace over here to kind of break up the space; [it] was actually a secondhand purchase,” Natalie says. She explained their Facebook Marketplace meet-cute in an Instagram post: “A young couple in Hollywood were moving out of their house, loved her and had dubbed her ‘Regina.’ They were very relieved to see Regina going to a good home.” Faux banana (at left) and majesty palms (right) are as gorgeous (and gorgeously low-maintenance) as the electric fireplace itself.

Glance casually at Natalie’s bedroom mantel and you might assume she’d shelled out for one of the ornate, big-ticket “it” mirrors that’s made social-media rounds in recent years. Not so: “The mirror is a DIY,” she says. “That is basically a piece of acrylic that I cut down, and I spray painted the acrylic. I’m really quite proud of this — and people are often impressed that this is not an actual mirror!” (We are impressed.)

Natalie’s bedside is an apt illustration of when and how to deploy charismatic vintage pieces (as in the case of her marbled nightstand and the pedestal bowl perched on its surface) and when to enjoy a little 21st-century luxury (as in her upholstered wingback bed and linens). Pieces like her Z Gallerie fringed table lamps, in turn, sport time-honored style and brand-new wiring.

Old Hollywood isn’t the only paradise that guides Natalie’s hand as she details her spaces. “This room is inspired by [Florida’s] Palm Beach lifestyle, and so there’s a lot of palm references in here with the chandelier, the plants in here [and the] cabana service [plaque],” she says.

“I have this little reading nook over [here] with a settee, and I really leaned into the millennial pink,” Natalie says. (Her bedroom walls sport Sherwin-Williams’ Breathless.) “When I moved in, the rooms upstairs were a salmon color and the walls in the guest room were a dark mud brown, which — I don’t know why anyone would choose that! So I replaced the carpet with hardwood floors and then just repainted [my bedroom] pink. [I’m] just being really unabashedly feminine with my design choices, and I’m still here riding the millennial-pink train.”

This diminutive-yet-dramatic vintage ibex side table both recalls the coffee table in Natalie’s living room and sparks joy in its own right. When curating her bedroom, “I was just trying to make a nice little cocoon of space where I could wake up and feel happy,” she says. “All these different secondhand finds — and pieces I picked up from traveling, and pieces that have traveled — really make my space.”

Blending new and old decor is meaningful to Natalie for aesthetic and environmental reasons. “There’s a sense of history that comes with owning a secondhand piece that really makes a house a home, and using sustainable decorative elements [is] something that I really try to achieve with my design,” she says.

From frequenting time-honored meccas like the Rose Bowl Flea Market and online exchanges like Facebook Marketplace and OfferUp to making impromptu swoops as she’s on unrelated adventures, Natalie leaves no stone unturned in pursuit of new-to-her pieces. “There’s thrift shops, there’s garage sales, there’s yard sales, estate sales … I go everywhere to find vintage! Not just through garage sales but also when I travel internationally and domestically,” she says.

At the far end of the bedroom, Natalie created a gilded, plush nook where she dresses in the morning. Her high-low, strategic spending is in evidence here as well: her pair of vintage, Dorothy Draper-style dressers came to $800 together, for example, while the peacock lamp beside her mirror was $125, and the sheepskin on the floor was $40.

Natalie’s black-and-white portrait parade continues in her dressing area with a cheekily-altered version of a Kate Moss photo by Craig McDean. The wall art rang in at $350; she found the gorgeous gilded Chinoiserie jewelry box beneath it for just $120.

Natalie’s apartment is a space for her to indulge in the purely aesthetic pursuits that entranced her as a child. “I loved drawing and writing when I was a kid. I was always that nerd that really liked fashion; I’ve always just really loved design and art.” We’re particularly fond of how she’s styled the accessories in her dressing area; who knew layered vintage trays would suit a graduated Pyrex cylinder of stacked statement bracelets?

Natalie’s “accidental content creator” career began when the epic wallpapered-door treatment in her walk-in closet-office — more on that in a moment — landed her in a design roundup. “Then, over the course of these past six years, I just kind of learned how to curate my style a little bit better,” she explains. “I have to say, like, [learning to DIY is] not bad! But it’s not for everybody, so Taskrabbit it out or be careful!”

Here's that epic flamingo-bedecked door! This versatile room is what Natalie has christened the "cloffice," — “my closet office,” she explains. “This is probably the room that gets the most use, [it’s] small but mighty. I work from here, I work out in here, it’s also a closet.” Functional as it is, it’s also perfectly in sync with the rest of her home’s aesthetic: Note the gold bamboo pulls on her desk drawers — which match her floor lamp beautifully, because of course they do — and the golden stapler and giraffe pen cup (an Anthropologie find).

The slanted wall at one end of the cloffice leaves little room to accommodate high-backed seating like a loveseat or sofa. The backless, tufted daybed Natalie deployed here is geometrically and aesthetically ideal.

“I feel like I’m in this season of my life where I’m really gravitating towards green,” Natalie says. “Even if it’s clothes or jewelry, I’m like, ‘What is this?’ To make it a little more cohesive, I used the same green elements around the house. And I‘ve been using a lot of black and gold elements as well.” The pale green she chose for the cloffice is Valspar’s Favourite Jade (similar to Behr’s Green Balsam); her living room, in turn, is Benjamin Moore’s Sage Wisdom.

Instead of tucking the accessories she loves best into hidden storage, Natalie treats her designer shoes like the art objects they are and displays them on a gleaming, glass-shelved etagere with bookends, figurines and curios. It’s a playful tableau that speaks to her interests and clutter-proofs the cloffice: When your shelving is this open, accidental accumulations are front and center.