A Messy Makeover

When Natalie Appell's sister-in-law heard that Natalie was having the office in her Beverly Hills home photographed by a national magazine, she had two words for Natalie: "You're insane!" Built to be the family library, Natalie's office morphed over the years into a disaster area, the receptacle for things that the mother of four says she "intended to deal with later." That meant the baby's car seat, tokens from Chuck E. Cheese's with once profound sentimental import, magazines saved for a single recipe, playbills from every concert she'd attended, and an exhaustive collection of finger paintings.