Santos is part of a younger generation of decor scavengers increasingly aware of furniture's massive carbon footprint and therefore happy to shop secondhand. They don't want to buy things that will be dumped a little further down the line. Globally, researchers estimate at least 51 million tons of furniture are consumed every year with more than 95% of it discarded.
The hardest part of giving the piece a new life, Tory says, was choosing a new fabric, and she actually turned to a lot of framed artwork in her home for inspiration. "I started noticing just different hues of yellow," she says, so she took home several swatches from F&S Fabrics in Los Angeles and landed on a "lemon yellow" with "undertones of chartreuse green," as she describes. Tory says it was slightly difficult to choose a yellow that still felt calming.