In apartment-hunting, as in job-hunting, it's all about who you know. For clothing designer Eliana Gil Rodriguez, it was her boyfriend Patrick's best friend who led them to their current digs. "He lived in the building, and we'd always heard stories of this mythical dome apartment," she remembers. "We got lucky that way because we knew about it before it was listed." Although the apartment, located in Los Angeles's Beachwood Canyon, is just one room, it was too good to pass up. "It's definitely not meant for two, but we were totally in love with the place and Patrick was going to be away on tour a lot [Editor's note: Patrick is a guitarist for The Weeknd], so we made it work."
The soaring ceiling the couple had heard about was indeed the apartment's pièce de résistance. "Originally, it was the meditation chamber for a theosophical community called the Krotona Colony. The building was built as their headquarters in the 1910s when the Hollywood Hills were mostly farmland. They moved to Ojai in the 1920s and the building was sold and turned into a hotel, and later into apartments. It still has the original built-in meditation seating all the way around the room and an altar in the center, under the dome," Eliana says. Now, the space serves as simply a lounging spot for the couple, although it's scattered with candles and a half-moon glass coffee table—nods to the dome's spiritual roots.