Influencer style
This article is part of “We Create SF” — a series of essays highlighting artists, performers, small businesses and anyone else that makes San Francisco iconic and irreplaceable.
By Adriana Roberts
Her TikTok videos and Instagram reels are an explosion of color and whimsy, featuring brightly-decorated rooms and creative DIY craft ideas, many of them narrated in a friendly, melodious voice that easily invites one into her quirky, colorful world.
Meet Tay Nakamoto, better known to the internet as Tay BeepBoop, a 30-year-old Japanese-Hawaiian who moved to San Francisco for college 13 years ago and decided to stay, and whose Instagram bio reads simply: “I make things??”
As a video editor who worked for big tech companies for many years, she found quick and unexpected fame in the fall of 2021 when her friends finally convinced her to post her home makeover project online. “I was never trying to be an influencer,” she told me. “I wasn’t trying to blast my life to the internet. I was just doing my own thing, working a lot at my full-time job and decorating in my free time.”
Tay always had a certain hustle and moxy though, like paying off $20,000 worth of student loans in only a year by living in a friend’s closet for $400 a month, and doing every focus group and odd job she could find. It’s a story so unbelievable, especially in San Francisco, that when Business Insider wrote about it, they asked for receipts just to confirm it was true.
Though that year of living in a closet was hard, it taught Tay some smart financial habits that stuck, and she was eventually able to save up enough money to buy her first home at 26, bucking the millennial cliché of never being able to afford home ownership.
“My goal was always to buy a house,” she said. “Because that meant stability and security. I ended up moving 10 times in 10 years. Now I won’t be kicked out because the owner decides to sell or double the rent, or all the reasons San Franciscans worry about. I don’t need to worry about uprooting every year.”
She admits, however, that her first home was an impulse buy during an undiagnosed manic bipolar episode. Just a month into the pandemic, she saw a century-old, 3-bedroom Victorian in the Mission for sale. “I saw the listing on a Wednesday, and was in escrow by Friday. I was so unwell,” she told me.
In an effort to improve her mental health, she began decorating it. “I didn’t have money to hire people because all of it went into buying the house,” she said. “But I could afford some paint. It was the very first time I tried decorating and I didn’t know what I was doing.”
She went to the hardware store to buy five gallons of paint in different colors.
“I wanted to make a mural in the corner of my bedroom,” she said. “And then I realized it doesn’t take 5 gallons to paint a few square feet. But I was stuck with $200 worth of paint. So I decided to just paint my whole damn house. I did a giant mural going down my entire hallway, down the stairwell, my cabinet and wall trim, my ceilings, I was just like, I’m getting rid of this paint. That quickly changed my house to be colorful and bright.”
“It was very much art therapy,” she said. “And it made me feel better. I had always wanted to make my space my own, but I just couldn’t. This was the first time where I was like, I have a canvas, I can do whatever I want!”
Slowly, she turned her home into a work of art. “When my friends saw my house, they told me to post it online, and I said, ‘This is crazy, I’m way too old for TikTok!’”
But during a slow period at work, she decided to try it. She cut two shots into a simple video, showcasing a bedroom window surrounded by a DIY greenery wall, and posted it to TikTok. Within one day, it had a million views.
“It just went viral, my very first video!” she exclaimed. “I had no idea that was special! I didn’t really use TikTok. I just thought, this is so easy, anyone can do this!”
So she continued creating videos, documenting her painting, sharing renter-friendly decorating hacks, and making response videos to some of the crazier comments. “Boomers call it a tacky preschool aesthetic,” she said. “People think it’s young, but I just think it’s fun!”
She says she doesn’t read her comments anymore, since some are quite toxic, especially on TikTok. “I can’t believe people get upset about how other people decorate their homes. It’s not your home, chill out!”
In January 2023, she lost her full-time job, a casualty of the big tech layoffs at the time. But rather than look for another job, she decided to lean into content creation. She parlayed her internet fame into a new career as an interior decorator, taking on projects for open-minded clients that give her free creative rein, doing brand partnerships, and creating her own wallpaper designs.
She also sold the house she had just spent two years decorating, whose walls and décor were now “internet-famous.” And she was able to sell it as is— complete with all her artwork, furnishings, and décor, including a 4-foot self-portrait of her face Photoshopped onto an image of Venus de Milo. “It’s San Francisco!” she said. “If any city would appreciate that, it would be this one!”
Asked if she misses that house, she says, “I have zero attachment to things. I call myself a minimal maximalist. Clean and loud. My walls are crazy and I have statement pieces, like a boob orb and a big Lego head. But I don’t have knick-knacks.”
Besides, she’s already been hard at work for the past year decorating her new home, a charming 2-bedroom in Laurel Heights that she shares with her boyfriend and cat, of which of course she’s been documenting on TikTok and Instagram.
Despite her recent success, Tay hasn’t forgotten her roots as a budget-minded decorator, often finding things on the cheap on Facebook Marketplace. “Facebook Marketplace is a great place to find deals on stuff,” she said. “It’s San Francisco, people have good taste.”
But her favorite spot for finding furnishings and home décor? The street!
“I love walking around San Francisco and finding ‘street treats,’” she said. “That’s what I call them. I recycle so many things from the street and have decorated many apartments with free shit I’ve found. I feel like it’s sort of normalized in SF, but I still get people who think it’s disgusting. I love turning trash into treasure.”
You can find Tay BeepBoop on TikTok and Instagram @taybeepboop
Adriana Roberts is a DJ and performer with her Bootie Mashup parties, as well as a writer and trans influencer.
The Bold Italic is a non-profit media organization that’s brought to you by GrowSF, and we publish first-person perspectives about San Francisco and the Bay Area. Donate to us today.
More photos of Tay BeepBoop’s colorful home
All photos below by Adriana Roberts for The Bold Italic
