Located in the ritzy Greenwich area near Chelsea Piers, Victoria 'Tori' Burns describes her Aunt Tessa's apartment as being "rambling and old". It has a cool and dark lobby with two doormen on shifts, Louie and Frank.
The building is a co-op, so the people who live there come up with the rules. Board members, currently made up of 15 people, are elected by tenants in the building. They meet in the Common Room. One rule is that no children under the age of 12 are allowed to live there. Most of the tenants are considered "fancy-dancy" snobs.
Tori and her Aunt Tessa live on the 12th Floor. The apartment is beautifully decorated with antiques and other beautiful works of art. One rug is a geometric-patterned Navajo rug from the 1800s. Almost every room has one. There's also a wooden sculpture of a dancing woman in one corner. Aunt Tessa has a small hallway table and keeps plenty of music here as well. She has an armchair that she relaxes in and a kitchen. The doorman's buzzer is in the kitchen.
In the dining room hangs a painting of Aunt Tessa's late husband Earnest Steinmetz.
Tori has a large and sunny room in the apartment. Originally, it was described as filled with rough-sewn Southwestern-style furniture, also with a Navajo rug on the floor, and a hand-woven cover for her computer. At some point, Tori's room was recreated to look more like Tori's My Room collection. Tori is sent to live with her Aunt Tessa by her parents, due to her dare-devilish behavior. They hope it will "calm her" and "help her stay focused".
There are three rooms at the end of a hallway that used to hold all of Aunt Tessa's old artwork for 30 years. It was dusty, and it had been abandoned so long the light bulbs had blown out.