Today we’d like to introduce you to Priscilla Cordoba Tarkington.
Hi Priscilla, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Hi! Thank you for having me. I am an Interior Designer, Set Decorator who grew up in Miami prior to moving across the country to pursue my education and career in film/tv production in Los Angeles, California. However in 2020, the covid pandemic hit our state of California hard with cases and with that, continuous restrictions and shutdowns. We longed for community and a house with a backyard close to our family in Miami, FL. On Christmas Day, 2021, while at our friend’s ranch in East Texas, I found a charming 2/2 house with a cute backyard providing the escape & relaxation we were seeking with tropical landscape and year-round butterflies!
Needless to say, I flew straight to Miami from Texas the next day to check it out! As a lover of natural light and bringing the “outdoors in”, I knew immediately on walking into the Florida Room that this casita was it! It had to be ours. An incredibly stressful month later, it became ours and we named our new home “Casita Mariposa”.
The casita provided a much-needed escape for us earlier this year when my husband was able to work remotely from the Florida Room. As a Set Decorator and Interior Designer, I loved the opportunity to transform our house into a tropical escapist home – reflecting the outdoors, on the inside. Instead of immediately remodeling the home into something shiny and modern, I embraced its age and drew inspiration from “Old Florida”.
Having spent my childhood (after elementary school) in Miami from 1991 – 2003, I remembered the style when visiting older homes in North Miami and even up to Boca Raton and West Palm Beach. There was something very cozy, inviting, and Caribbean about the use of warm colors, wicker, rattan, cane, and florals. I took that imagery and blended it with inspiration from my world travels, using coral and blue as my inspiration color palette. Then I brightened it up a bit for modern time’s sake!
Just outside our Florida Room is our petite backyard. We like to picnic there (picnic blanket style) and our nieces love to do cartwheels, play games, and even use their VR headsets outside! We have a hammock and also a reading nook (a shaded daybed), a couple of chaise lounges for sunning, and lastly an outdoor living room. It is our petite tropical sanctuary we love to share with our family.
My husband and I went from hosting dinner parties at our California townhome to hosting family dinners at our Florida Room, with our gatherings spilling outside to the lounging areas. As of late Spring earlier this year, my husband’s offices reopened for a hybrid office/work from home scenario, so we flew back to California to work from there. It was time to open our doors to guests to enjoy Casita Mariposa Florida as a vacation rental property. We opened our business, Mariposa Homes Properties LLC.
Having a background in the entertainment industry compels me to create an experience, whether someone is joining us as a guest for dinner or overnight! As a traveler (having visited 35 countries) and guest at hotels and Airbnbs around the world, I try to anticipate our guest’s needs, drawing on what my family and I appreciated or desired when staying at short-term rentals together. I’m always the designated travel planner, and travel troubleshooter in our family.
The experience we are offering at Casita Mariposa Florida is a “Tropical Escape” in the form of a cozy, fully equipped 1400 sqft home with a backyard featuring multiple lounging areas. The year-round tropical greens are what I always found beautiful about South Florida and now I have a chance to share it with guests visiting my favorite part of the US!
Our goal is to welcome guests from around the world to South Florida with an interior featuring the warmth of rattan, palms, and coral colors while only an 8-minute drive to the beach, trendy Aventura restaurants, and the artsy town of Hollywood! Between two major airports (Fort Lauderdale and Miami), the city of Hallandale Beach offers a wide variety of grocery stores, international restaurants, and bakeries, as well as options for vegans and the chicken wing & beer crowd at Flanigan’s.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Definitely not easy! LOL. When we had our projected date to be back in Los Angeles by late April of 2022, we knew we had to ramp up our preparations to be guest-ready to open our business doors by our desired date of May 1st. It really became a race to the finish line. Designing and sourcing a space quickly is not foreign to me but it’s always stressful because I want it to come together as its own unique, harmonious space by a certain time! Just to name a few things, we did run into electrical issues and needed more parts ordered while trying to hook up these two gorgeous Gaugin Minka Bahama ceiling fans that took forever to arrive for our living room and Florida room.
Everything needed to have a tropical vibe, including our ceiling fans! My husband and his brother amazingly handled all of the electrical and it was complex! Growing up, the brothers had to work on their house personally since they didn’t have the money to pay a contractor. All of that experience has paid off. Casita Mariposa has its quirks from its construction in the 1960s. I also had to cancel my first choice on a beautiful cane headboard since the arrival date kept getting pushed back and eventually past our open for business date. I quickly sourced another. The permitting process took longer than we anticipated and felt complex as well, but at that point, we were grateful to bring in Hollywood-based, Slate Management to help turn Casita Mariposa into a proper vacation rental. While we didn’t make our desired May 1st opening date, we were glad to have the help and support with all of the permitting paperwork.
Until that point, everything was a family affair, from assembling furniture, to handyman fixes. It was a blessing to begin our short-term rental business close to our family in Miami.
We ended up changing our property management team as we learned that while we appreciated their hard work getting us up and running, they weren’t right for us in the long term. That was also a lesson we learned. Property management teams are not a cookie cutter fit. While they work for some properties and owners, they may not work for others, and that’s ok!
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Casita Mariposa Florida was lovingly decorated with South Florida and tropical escapism in mind. As an Interior Designer and Set Decorator, I am available for work in California, and Florida and will travel abroad.
Contact Info:
- Website:casitamariposaflorida.
com - Instagram: @
casitamariposaflorida - Other: priscillatarkington.
com
