Safe Spaces: Writer and Performer Andie Flores

The environments we inhabit and the spaces we create for ourselves inform and shape us just as we go about shaping and decorating them. “Safe Spaces” is a new series meant to explore that relationship, by visiting female and female-identifying creators and doers in the spaces and places nearest and dearest to them.

Writer and performer Andie Flores won’t live here long. By the beginning of the next year, she’ll be in a new space in Cherrywood — a different house with enough natural light to suit her plants and one with designated work and lounge areas to suit her lifestyle.

For now though, this spot on the East Side —  not far from Hillside Farmacy and just down the street from the George Washington Carver Museum —  is home to her, as well as to her partner, graphic designer Ivan Alonso, and their dog, Baxon.

At times it’s ‘work’ too, as the setting of most project meetings and brainstorming sessions conducted with cast members of Doper than Dope, the award-winning original sketch show she helped write. A small office space below a reading and lounging loft is the home base from which Flores operates Muy Excited, an online shop of “handpicked vintage treats for the disco diva.” Wherever the workspace in her multimodal home, Andie prefers to keep it tidy to limit distractions.

But, there’s also room for play. While Ivan is the plant man, furnishing the one-bedroom home with ample greens, Andie brings a playful aesthetic to the interior as inspired by PeeWee’s Playhouse. A Big Bird planter nestled among more modest pots is the perfect marriage of what both bring to the table (a sleek, modern, wooden-topped table, if we’re talking dining). It’s likely that the plastic, pink Power Ranger mask hanging in the home’s living room is Andie’s doing as well.

Walking through the house, one can count two Frida Kahlo self-portraits and one Frida Kahlo portrait in three separate locations — a clear through-line of decoration in what's otherwise a colorful collection of eclectic, inspiring pieces, like the wall of framed art in the living room.  

It's those pieces that make the house feel like a lived-in home — pieces that will likely follow Andie, Ivan, and Baxon to the next space they inhabit.