SHE BUILT A JUNGLE IN SILVERLAKE
Inside the greenhouse of Raquel "Rockii" Navarro, where sterling silver, wild vines, and a philosophy of abundance create an urban oasis
SANCTUARIES LA EXPLORES THE QUIETER SIDE OF LOS ANGELES THROUGH DESIGN.
ROOTED IN THE BELIEF THAT SANCTUARY EXISTS EVERYWHERE, OFTEN HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT.
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I first found Raquel Navarro of Rockii Studios through my friend Allie Brown, who co-hosted a series of workshops with her and Usal in the Sequoias and posted about it. Then her greenhouse started appearing on my feed. I went to one of her beading workshops in 2024, arrived stressed, left blissed out. Some spaces do that. I wanted to know how she built one.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY SHELBY NICO DIAMOND
EVENT PHOTOGRAPHY BY JULISSA AARON
The morning I arrive at Raquel Navarro’s house in the hills of Silverlake, two baby hummingbirds are tucked into a nest just outside the greenhouse door. I almost didn’t notice them. Then I stop and take a closer look. It’s that kind of space.
Raquel — who goes by Rockii, and runs her jewelry brand and workshop space under the name Rockii Studios — meets me in the backyard on a warm spring morning, draped in silver. The air smells alive. The vines that now cascade over the roof of her glass-and-wood greenhouse have grown so dense and green that sunlight falls through them in rare dappled patches, the way it does in places that feel more secret than constructed. Which is exactly what this place is.
It has a name: the Jewelry Jungle.
There is a Pinterest board at the origin of all of this. “I always had a Pinterest board full of greenhouses,” she tells me, settled at the wood worktable her father helped her assemble, surrounded by trays of beads. “One day I wanted to have a greenhouse where I grew my veggies.”
She moved into this Silverlake house in January 2021 — on her birthday, January 15th — after what she describes as a cosmically arranged encounter. She had met her future roommate, movement artist Cami Árboles, through an online jewelry order. Cami reposted her package, Raquel was drawn to her, and months later, at a beading gathering at a house a few doors up the hill (the same house where Shiloh Enoki of Tea at Shiloh started testing her late-night tea house concept), something clicked into place. It was December 21st, 2020, with the world still in lockdown and the eve of the Saturn-Jupiter Great Conjunction, one of the most significant astrological events in decades.
“We were all sharing our dreams for when the world opens up,” Raquel says. “We wanted to create communities and shared spaces because we believe spaces can heal you. And so by the end of the night I knew that these are my platonic soulmates.”
That night, Cami mentioned she’d spotted a house for rent down the hill and asked if Raquel would want to be the third roommate. She didn’t need to think about it. “I didn’t even know what the house looked like, but I was down.”
She already knew it was hers.
One week after moving in, she had her eye on the backyard. A month and a half later, the greenhouse was built.
Raquel grew up going to Home Depot with her dad, a self-taught electrician who could, as she puts it, “just do anything.” When it was time to build, she went back to find her team. “I’ve never been flocked by so many men,” she says, laughing. “It was like 30 men.” She chose two — strangers who had met that morning — and she showed them her Pinterest board. She said, “Can you make this for me? Let’s do it.”
They built the bones in six weeks for around $25,000, materials and labor included. It’s paid itself off many times over.
The round windows came later. A trip to Mexico City, where she stayed at El Nido de Quetzacóatl made her come home and look at her own walls differently. “I was like, why don’t I have round windows?” She found them on Alibaba — both, custom-sized, black-rimmed, with spinning hardware, for $2,000 total including shipping. Her dad installed them. He’s the one she calls when she has a list.
“I am grateful I grew up going to the hardware store with my dad,” she says. “That’s where I think I get it from. The DIY genes. He’s a handy Mexican dad. An electrician who was self-taught. So valuable. So blessed.”
The vines she didn’t plant. They came from a neighbor’s yard and simply took over. “It’s their home,” she says, and means it.
Silver has always been the thread. Raquel grew up spending summers in Mexico — Tulum, beach towns, her grandmother’s neighborhood in Mexico City — and her eye went straight to the jewelry sold in the markets. Mexico holds more silver than anywhere else in the world, much of it from a small town called Taxco. As a child she was drawn to it without fully understanding why. Later she would learn about the healing properties attributed to the metal. Its conductivity. What some describe as its ability to protect and clear.
“I just thought it was so magical,” she says. “The way it reflects. And I just thought it was so cool to wear a little piece of my roots. A little piece of art you can wear.”
Much of her sterling silver is now produced in Mexico City by a couple in their thirties who live above their studio — two people, one small production, very intentional orders. It gives her an excuse to go back every few months. Business and pleasure, she says. Same thing, really.
The workshops came gradually, then all at once. She had always loved the shared experience of making something with other women — bringing beads to friends’ houses as a girl, the ancestral intimacy of sitting together and creating. “I came out the womb crafting,” she says. Now workshops run most weekends, up to twelve people in the greenhouse, at $100 a person. She’s hosted corporate team-building events, birthday parties for six-year-olds and sixty-six-year-olds, brand activations for Puma and Saie Beauty. She’s taken the workshops into the woods with Usal.
And recently, the greenhouse became something else entirely for one evening — a candlelit dinner hosted by chef Magdalena O’Neal. Cocktails along one end of the table, a chef friend behind the drinks, flash tattoos happening in the adjacent room. “It was so romantic in here,” she says. “Candles everywhere. Everyone felt like a friend by the end of the night.” She’s already planning the next one. A brunch this time.
What people carry out from the events or the beading workshops isn’t just the full belly or the piece they’ve made. “I get the most beautiful messages after this,” Raquel says. “They’re like, because of you, I’ve literally quit my 9-to-5. I’m like — because of this experience, it transformed them.” One workshop participant went on to become a personal chef. Others have left with friendships they didn’t expect. “People become friends after this. It’s so beautiful.”
She describes the workshop as meditative. Art therapy. A place where something in people opens. “They come in super stressed out from LA life, and I ease them into it. And they create the most beautiful piece. And they’re like, wow. This space really inspired me to just surrender.”
The space has evolved alongside her. A wood table her dad helped her build. Hilma af Klint prints on the walls. A butterfly she keeps as a reminder that change is the only constant. Plans for a moon-shaped light fixture with beads hanging from it, a stained glass panel in one of the windows, a vine canopy over the garden beds outside. “It’s evolved so much with me,” she says.
I asked her what sanctuary meant to her.
Before I left, I went back to look at the hummingbird nest one more time. The mom had come and gone several times over the course of our interview — out into the world, back again, out again — while her babies sat there, snug and unworried. She knew they were safe here.
Two new lives, tucked into the corner of something someone built with their own longing. It is not a coincidence that the hummingbird chose here, against Raquel’s own nest. This is what a haven looks like when a woman builds it — not a paradise kept behind a gate, but one left open. Where the most tender things come to rest. Where people arrive carrying the weight of the city and leave, somehow, lighter. Softer. More themselves. The Jewelry Jungle does that. Raquel does that.
She built a sanctuary, and the world, slowly, keeps finding its way to her door.
Rockii Studios workshops are hosted at the Jewelry Jungle in Silverlake. Find her at @rockiistudios on Instagram.
Additional Photography by Julissa Aaron.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.