What $4,000 Gets You In Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan | NYC Apartment Tours (1 bedroom)

Auto-captioned from the film, lightly cleaned. Elena's words, not edited prose.

hi hello i'm back how's it going today i'm bringing you guys another buzzed in apartment video which i'm psyched on so basically in this series i go around and i show people's apartments so my friend melissa has an absolutely stunning apartment in hell's kitchen and is excited to show it off so we're going to head to her apartment i'm going to show you guys off her incredible space i feel like for me hell's kitchen in like that area but manhattan i spend so little time in i know so little about so i'm excited to see it get to learn a little bit more so i looked up a little bit of the history of hell's kitchen because i was curious about where the name came from and so in like the late 1800s early 1900s there was a lot of immigrants that moved into the area and there's a lot of like gang violence and like a ton of crime so not the best spot back in the 1800s but apparently that's where like the name hell's kitchen came from is either like potentially a gang and since then of course it's been quite gentrified and is a lot nicer and more upscale it also has a huge lgbtq community there so you can find a lot of really great like gay bars and just a lot of gay pride and presence there which i think is really cool so now it's time to head to melissa's apartment she's great i actually met her at like this instagram event back in 2018.

i'm excited to show you guys her beautiful apartment so let's head on over hey conan if you need to learn how to talk to a lady hey everyone my name is melissa fresco and i live in a one-bedroom apartment and hell's kitchen with my partner jordan we share rent but we pay four thousand dollars total so two thousand dollars each so this is the entryway we've got all of our masks which is something i never thought i'd be accumulating and styling we've got some sunglasses over here this has been a great find so nice to just you know grab a pair run out the door instead of searching through the house for them of course our vocabulary words so we can practice before we leave and then we just have a very standard closet over here we've got the gallery wall going on over here so i ordered a bunch of prints from society6 a lot of the frames we already had and some of these prints i actually got when i was in brooklyn i think it's just a nice little focal point to have when you first walk in the house so this is the kitchen it's a pretty standard kitchen we cook most nights i think before quarantine we were ordering out a lot and now we're kind of trying to get ourselves back on track doing some more cooking i'm trying to become better at it but this is where yara eats as well this is the silliest thing but it's actually really great for recipes i'm not the best natural cook yet but i'm still working on it trying to expand my uh recipe list a little bit so this is super helpful when it comes to cooking this is yara she lives with me she's a german shepherd collie mix she's a fluffy german chocolate so these are our bar stools i'll be honest we almost never eat here we mostly at the coffee table but they look nice and are here if you need them um we got the bar cart which is probably my favorite piece of furniture in the whole apartment i got this at my first place in brooklyn and it was my absolute favorite thing to decorate and i really love it i also knew alana was coming and had to finish some things around the apartment and actually made these two prints yesterday it was super easy i'll have a little diy on my tic toc probably in the next couple days this piece is actually from etsy and it's totally customizable um the woodworker can really make them however you want whatever size would ever stay in they were a great find i find a lot of like more unique stuff on etsy it's a great place for home stuff and you can actually arrange them however you want in our old place we had them horizontally over the tv but for this they just happen to fit really well as well this is the living room where we spend probably most of our time and this is your spot on the couch if you say couch this is where she goes and this is the plant wall my very favorite project i've ever done in here we got this pathos plant really small it grew to be really big within like a couple of months and then after a year or so we put it on this and this is about two years of growth so it is doing so well i love it add so much color and life into the space and kind of have helped us from having to pick something to put on the wall that's like such a focal point so we actually moved to this apartment in july we were living in brooklyn for two years beforehand and when we found this place it's almost like a carbon copy of our original place so we got really lucky and we're able to just drop all the furniture in the same place so we actually had a few friends visit recently and they were like did you even move because it really does look extremely similar to our first apartment in brooklyn so we've got the full-length mirror over here this was such a good find from ikea it's the hovit mirror it's 125 i'd say probably 90 of new york city owns it but it is amazing we actually painted the wall green we're going to be in this apartment for two years so we figured we can paint it back and we have a little bit of time to at least enjoy it but i love the green it really ties in so well all the other colors and just kind of takes away that starkness of all the white you see in like every new york apartment so i actually got jordan the record player for his med school graduation gift i love this one specifically because it actually connects to the bluetooth speaker so the sound is really good um i actually love how it looks and i bought a couple of modern albums but we got really lucky his parents saved all their original like 60s 70s 80s albums so this is just a very small chunk of their collection over here oh my gosh i am jealous elena they had all six of these and they're like oh this is a good one this is a good morning we know like one song from one of these bands that's why we're like okay we need to like try these and we're like keep these these and they both are rental music so they both have doubles and everything we're like you guys are crazy and they're just sitting in their basements so wait that's so like slowly trying to work our way through it the tv is was our first you know combined christmas gift to each other when we first moved in our tv was like the size of a postcard hanging over this on a huge wall and it just looked so ridiculous and very thankful for this one to say the least so this is called the tradis gancia nanuk definitely one of my more unique plants the purple is so beautiful the lavender going through it and when i first got it was so tiny and this summer it grew like crazy so i'm very proud of this guy beautiful this was actually the first plant we ever got when we moved in together it's a snake plant they pretty much are indestructible so he's been doing very well and a nice monster growing this guy also was dying right before we moved brought it back to life so one of the big things living with my partner is the function versus fashion argument it's kind of our mix of functional and fashionable um this has some a lot of jordan's books he's definitely more of a paper book reader i'm an e-reader so i have to attribute most of this collection to him this is actually one of the coolest things i think we have from our travels it's a shell from the tobago keys he actually went to school in grenada and the tobago caves are a small island like an hour off of grenada it's not inhibited by anyone and we did like whole snorkeling thing there so like the shelf is definitely like a hybrid of both of our things so this is an old camera from jordan's grandma i think and his grandpa's actually really into rocks and geology so a lot of the little rocks you'll kind of see throughout the house are from his collection i know i mentioned that we've kept pretty much all of our furniture from our first brooklyn apartment but this was actually one thing we did want to upgrade so we decided to do a really large shared desk and this is actually a dining room table it's eight feet long but it accommodates both of us perfectly my side i like the hers versus his look very cute so this is my side of the desk and this is jordan's we very clearly have our own style going on here but we do most of our work here he still studies unfortunately he does all the studying there i do all my work here so it's nice to actually be able to work together sometimes this is our bedroom this was the first space that i really kind of revamped we moved into the new apartment it was originally a blue theme and now it's a green theme but i love the prints over our bed um jordan is very attached to the highland cow and i've definitely grown to like it myself over here we've got a little seating area which is nice i've got my kind of impromptu clothing rack on this side which i just hung up a couple days ago as well i love sitting here sometimes i'll do some work in here have coffee read um yara loves to sit on the bed and i'll hang out over here this is my dresser this is jordan's we both have a lot of clothes and both needed our own dressers so have these two set ups are actually pretty good storage wise um love the circle mirror i feel like this is always something that like i like having over the dresser and then we've got our closet over here which is surprisingly big for the city um i've got my side jordan side and then we're very lucky again for new york people we do have a washer dryer obviously our luggage that hasn't been touched in months is up here and here's the bathroom it's a very standard bathroom one of the best parts though is the medicine cabinet it's huge holds all of our stuff this is jordan's side and the shared side like medicine things like that and this is my side i am a full-time content creator on instagram and tick tock and i focus on curly hair and interior decorating and a little bit of fashion as well i also recently started working one-on-one with clients to help decorate their homes set up their you know perfect work from home office a cozy living room that they want to be in every day especially now that we're spending so much extra time at home something i love is being able to find something really high-end on pinterest or you know west elm restoration hardware and then finding something really similar that kind of achieves that same look at a more budget-friendly price so that's something i really try to do for all my clients and i really specialize in that apartment style furniture smaller living lots of storage everything has to have two purposes right now i'm working both virtually and in person with anyone that's located in new york or even north jersey and those that are not located close by i'm able to accommodate virtual meetings i'd say i get most of my home inspiration from pinterest and from instagram i love following some good home accounts and i really just kind of go with what i like our plants are definitely like the guiding light i'd say if i see a new plant that i want i make sure that takes priority in this place other than that we really like to decorate you know with things we found over our travels things from our families and just generally stuff that we've kind of brought around through our lives first thing we got was a snake plant which is a perfect plant for beginners you pretty much cannot kill it but since then we've really accumulated about i want to say like 20 different plants in here and i love each and every one of them i cannot tell you how happy i get when i see a new little leaf coming out i'd say the best plants for beginners are snake plant pathos aloe vera plant fiddly fig is honestly pretty easy to care for they do the best when you just ignore them monsters are also pretty easy to care for as well yeah when we started looking for a new place after we'd accumulated all these plans it was pretty much a must-have to have south-facing windows or they were all going to die so i had to make sure we got that direct sunlight which we did in this place luckily i get a lot of questions about living with a dog in the city and one thing a lot of people don't know is that most parks you're allowed to have your dog off leash before 9am and after 9pm a lifesaver she's a big dog she loves to run around so every day we go to central park before 9am get a good run in she loves to play fetch so that's a great way to you know give your dog exercise great way to socialize then there's always a ton of dogs at the park and with us we're right by central park which is a huge perk of living here we love going there every day so we're located kind of in a non-neighborhood if i'm being honest we're at the very top of hell's kitchen the very bottom of the upper west side and we kind of sit right between riverside park and central park which is kind of awesome actually walk a few minutes in being hell's kitchen amazing restaurants there like the best every cuisine you could ever want we've tried so many good places and you can walk a little bit north you've got great shopping on broadway upper west side is really beautiful so classic looking and then central park is also only a few avenues away which of course is great for yara but also just such a nice thing to have so nearby i would say this neighborhood is very residential it's a lot of healthcare workers the amount of people i see in scrubs at any given time is significantly higher than i think anywhere else in the city a lot of young families a lot of kids a million dogs yeah so hell's kitchen has some really great restaurants like every single cuisine you could ever think of is just lined up down 9th and 10th avenue i love beef thai i am obsessed with thai food yeah being close to both central park and riverside is actually really nice because you get the waterfront you get the beautiful park aspect and you can also there's a really good bike path all the way down i think it goes from like 100th all the way to the end of manhattan and we recently started doing city bike and riding down to west village meat packing and it's such a quick trip because we are right here on the water