Inside a colourful converted church apartment with a heavy dose of quirk

Sara Camposarcone desperately needed to upsize. The 28-year-old content creator is known on TikTok for her unabashedly quirky personal style—think multiple tutus, layers of necklaces, different coloured socks and dresses made out of vintage pillowcases, sometimes all in one outfit. Since 2018, she’d been living in a one-bedroom basement apartment in Grimsby that was becoming increasingly cramped due to her sustainable maximalist lifestyle. Camposarcone goes thrifting at least once a week, both for fun and for work, bringing back trinkets and clothes to add to her already overstuffed closet. She was storing her clothes, filming her videos and sleeping in a single room. As a result, the backgrounds of her videos were filled with overflowing rolling racks of clothes. “I was getting lost in there,” she says.

Related: How one couple transformed an old church into a polychromatic playhouse

Though she often heads to Toronto for work, Camposarcone has no desire to live downtown. So the Ancaster native limited her apartment search to Hamilton, eventually signing a lease on a 1,100-square-foot three-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment in a converted Anglican church for $2,800 a month. The space is replete with beatific stained glass windows, an altar and high vaulted ceilings. With a parking spot, in-unit laundry and an entire room she can dedicate to clothes, the apartment had everything Camposarcone was looking for. She saw it as a blank canvas. “My home decor style is similar to how I dress in the sense that it’s colourful,” she says. “Because this apartment has white walls, I can let the furniture speak for itself.”

Since moving in June, Camposarcone has brought the space to life with her kooky and surreal sensibility.  The living room is home to a purple velvet couch ($700) and an S-for-Sara-shaped coffee table ($300), both cheap and cheerful finds from the Brick. There’s also a hamburger-shaped ottoman from HomeSense ($60), a vintage pencil-shaped coat rack from the Hamilton Antique Mall ($60) and throw pillows shaped like barbed wire balloon animals by Shy Talaga (gifted). The bright-red circle rug, which reminds her of a stop sign or clown nose, was an IKEA find ($170). “A lot of things in my home resemble smaller objects. They’re a little bit comical and silly, but they represent who I am,” she says.

Camposarcone had been collecting furniture to put in her dream home long before she moved, like the squiggly wire wine rack she found at an antique mall in London and the bubble mirror that hangs above the couch, found on Facebook Marketplace for $40. Her most sentimental piece is the wooden 1950s mid-century credenza with a built-in bar and stereo, which once belonged to her grandma. It sits on a wall just off the kitchen, painted bright blue to add extra colour to the space. Her mint-condition yellow 1950s formica dining table set ($200) was another Facebook Marketplace find, which she drove to Kitchener to retrieve. The seller told her it was from an old diner but had been left untouched in the back room, explaining its pristine condition.

Rather than hauling the contents of her capacious closet up a flight of stairs, Camposarcone opted to transform the downstairs bedroom into a renter-friendly walk-in closet. Using floor-to-ceiling tension rods from Amazon ($100), she and her mother installed eight hanging bars that hold what she estimates to be over 1,000 items of clothing. (Some of it is stored in her bedroom dresser.) All of her shoes and bags are stored across three Billy bookcases from IKEA ($120 each). “I love being able to see everything at once. It helps me when I’m styling outfits,” she says. Naturally, it’s her favourite room in the house. “It’s where I spend the most time and have my most creative ideas.”

Upstairs is Camposarcone’s bedroom, a peaceful nook with white walls that serves as the perfect setting to display her boy band pillows and Care Bear collection. She reserved the room with the best light in the house to serve as her home studio, where she films outfit videos for her Tiktok. In one corner sits a photo umbrella and a ring light as well as a desk entirely dedicated to sewing. “Before, I would have to set up my sewing machine on my kitchen table. I do feel like I can get more accomplished now that I have the space to do it,” she says. It’s also where she set up an IKEA glass display cabinet to store her collection of vintage Hello Kitty and Rugrats toys.

As whimsical as her space is, Camposarcone has managed to create a quiet sanctuary that feels like home. For a maximalist, she’s surprisingly averse to too much stuff. “I like eclectic pops of colour everywhere, but I never want to feel like I’m living in a super cluttered space. Things need to be tidy and in their spot. It helps me feel inspired and calm,” she says. The only downside to living in a 200-year-old church is the lack of electrical outlets. There’s nowhere in the living room to plug in a television without running an extension cord across the floor, so she’s living a TV-free life for now.

It took just two weeks for her to set up the entire apartment. “I hate the moving process,” she says, “so the sooner I get settled in my space and feel like things are in their spot, the sooner I can breathe again.” While the space is more or less finished, she has set her sights on some DIY projects to customize it further, like wrapping a floor lamp in cellophane so it resembles a giant lollipop from Willy Wonka’s factory. She’s thinking of creating an accent wall with some wallpaper designed by her friend Kaarin Joy for Dizzy With Excitement in the kitchen and perhaps adding a black-and-white checkerboard tile backsplash to give it a vintage feel.

Now that she’s settled, Camposarcone wants to stay in the space for at least two years, but she hopes to live in New York someday. In the meantime, she’s managed to create a home that feels like a physical extension of her personality. “I want people to come in and think, This is so you,” she says. “I think I’ve done a pretty good job.”