Working in a closet that used to hold a Murphy bed in an orange living
room in a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles, Tana March answers an
e-mail from a teenager in need of advice: Fifteen-year-old Sandra has a
"really small attic room" and has picked a "very pale green" for the
walls. But she wants tips for dealing with a wall that "isn't
vertical."
March fires back a suggestion: Turn the slanted wall into a headboard:
"Hang sheets or sheers from the ceiling all around the bed to create a
canopy and use under the bed to store things," she writes. "Try hanging
paper lanterns from different heights on the wall so they hang down over
your bed like stars in the sky!" And while you're at it: "Do you have a
chair in there? Give it the boot and make room for overstuffed pillows or
a beanbag chair."
March is not shy when it comes to giving advice. "I love helping people
tap into their resourcefulness," she says. "What I want to do is help
people get in touch with their creativity -- without having to spend a ton
of money. Because, you know, the people that I relate to don't have a ton
of money. They're young."
A lot of labels fit March, 34, founder of TanasHabitat.com, a Web site
geared toward Gens X and Y and possibly Z: Start with artist, entrepreneur
and go-to girl. Move on to magazine columnist, faux-finisher, design
consultant, Dumpster diver and junkyard scavenger. Include furniture
builder, tie-dye seamstress and duct tape artiste.
Montana-born March -- whose first name is pronounced like her home
state: "Tana from Montana" -- combines outspoken, avant-garde style with a
determination to "make the impossible possible." Her do-it-with-daring
approach is apparently just what legions of teens and twenty-somethings
are looking for.
TanasHabitat.com, which launched in 2000, is now logging more than
300,000 hits a month, mainly from 12- to 24-year-olds, March says. Between
her Web site and the do-it-yourself columns she writes for Teen and Teen
Beat magazines, plus occasional articles for Seventeen.com, March figures
that she has reached as many as 3.5 million people. Recently, she signed
on for a monthly syndicated column in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. And
then there are the hundreds of e-mails to her Web site a month.
Jamii Martin, 24, a student and bartender from Daytona Beach, Fla.,
says she checks out tanashabitat.com every week. "After
numerous attempts to find decorating projects that suit my generation, I
just decided that asking Tana would be my best bet," she wrote in an
e-mail interview. "Her site is full of info for us Gen-Xers. I think it's
awesome how Tana shares her ideas with some of us who get stumped for
creativity. She gave me some great advice on how to add metal to kitchen
cabinets." Plus, adds Martin, "her advice on money, dating [and] beauty
treatments is all great. Tana's habitat is just a haven of information for
life."
Katrina Macrae, 21, a student at University of California at Santa
Barbara, says by e-mail that she has checked out the site "a handful" of
times. "It's got a little bit of everything," she says. "Advice about
people, how to clean spots out of your rug, how to cook dinner,
interesting craft ideas. It's a conglomeration of ideas and activities
that are fun and interesting, but totally unique."
Macrae asked Tana for ideas for decorating a dorm room -- "Dorm rooms
are very hard to decorate due to limited space, funds and flexibility,"
Macrae said; Tana sent some suggestions, and asked for photos to see how
the room turned out.
The Web site has grown into a full-time job for March and her business
partner, Scott Acord. Acord, who used to do publicity for the DreamWorks
movie studio, handles public relations and marketing. March tackles
technical aspects from the closet- turned-office in her West Hollywood
apartment. On the phone from L.A., March describes her own apartment:
Orange living room walls set off a lavender sofa (she made the slipcovers)
and a castoff chair she covered in white faux fur; she calls it her
"abominable snow chair," and it sits beside her living room window.
"That's where I sit for my morning coffee," says March. The office can
disappear when she closes the double doors. The bedroom is green, the
bathroom purple. In the icy-blue kitchen, she covered cabinets with
aluminum sheets from a roofing supply store, then coated them with a
rusting solution for an aged look. Now they're dotted with colorful
plastic clothespins on magnets that hold pictures, notes and recipes.
"It's very handy," says March.
And so, apparently, is she. When not working the Web, March toils away
in a rented garage she has transformed into a workshop. Recently, she was
commissioned to make a radiator cover, which she constructed out of found
wood, ceiling tin tiles and homemade paint. She likes to make lamps from
found objects; she has been experimenting with resin casting to turn heads
from baby dolls into nightlights. The lamps are for sale on her Web site
($250 to $450), along with "tie-dyed togs for tots" ($28 for a onesie).
She says her best-selling product is a homemade shaving cream called Whip,
which comes in three scents and is sold in several L.A. shops and on her
site ($14 for a four-ounce container).
Then there are her duct tape designs: Strips of colored tape are woven
into napkin rings ($16 for four), placemats ($50 for four), checkbook
covers ($35) and a purse ($60). It's time consuming to "double side stick"
the tape into smooth strips, weave them together and add a seam, says
March, but the result is "really beautiful."
March says her creativity springs from necessity. "I started out as a
person who always wanted to just hire somebody to do it for me," she says.
"I'd never painted any- thing, picked up a hammer or gotten dirty. I just
didn't want anything to do with that."
But in 1993, a couple of years after she moved to L.A. to pursue an
acting career, she was down on her luck and her attitude changed. "I was
in Los Angeles all by myself, I had just $50 to my name, and I lived in an
empty apartment." She found some wood in an alley and remembered watching
her former boyfriend make furniture for their apart- ment. "I'd seen him
make a bed and I'd seen him make a table and I knew that I could do that.
So I spent my last 50 bucks on a drill, pulled the wood into my apartment
and built myself a desk."
That was a turning point. "I just started experimenting. My eyes were
just com- pletely opened to something that was so new and different that I
started looking at everything in a different way. Everything I saw, I was
like, 'Wow, I wonder what I can make out of that?' "
She worked as an apprentice for an expert faux finisher for about three
years and says she has done faux finishing and furniture finishing "for
many famous movie and TV stars" -- though she won't name names. "But I
will tell you that I refinished what was once Tom Selleck's kitchen," she
says. "Unfortunately, he didn't live there anymore."
On the horizon? Possibly a TV show, an idea that came to March when a
pal stopped by and caught her making furniture in a "goofy dress" she'd
made out of a muumuu. "My friend said, 'Oh. my gosh, look at you, covered
in sawdust. You're like the Martha Stewart of MTV!' "
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